THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 
THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS 

BY  WILLIAM  STEPHEN  RAINSFORD 


Of  rn,a, 


f)  1913  ^ 


BR  121  ,R3  1913 
Rainsford,  William  Stephen 

1850-1933. 
The  reasonableness  of  the 

relief  ion  of  Jesus 


THE   REASONABLENESS 
OF  THE   RELIGION   OF  JESUS 


THE  REASONABLENESS 
OF  THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS 


BY 


WILLIAM  STEPHEN  RAINSFORD,  D.D 


BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

(3Tbe  fitoer?i&e  pre??  Cambrt&fle 

1913 


COPYRIGHT,    1913,    BY   WILLIAM   STEPHEN   RAINSFORD 
ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED 

Published  February  igij 


NOTE 

The  substance  of  this  volume  was  first  used 
as  the  Baldwin  Lectures  for  1911  at  the  Uni- 
versity of  Michigan,  under  the  Baldwin  Lec- 
tureship for  the  Establishment  and  Defense 
of  Christian  Truth. 


CONTENTS 

Introduction ix 

I.   The   Reasonableness   and  Necessity  of 

Growth  and  Change  in  Religion       .       3 

II.   Jesus'  Doctrine  of  the  Seed  :  the  Method 

of  Growth  and  Change    ....    33 

III.  Jesus'  Doctrine  of  the  Seed  —  Continued     76 

IV.  The  Naturalness  and  Supernaturalness 

of  Jesus 114 

V.   Jesus'  Doctrine 162 

VI.   Jesus'  Doctrine  of  Man's  Approach   to 

God 204 


INTRODUCTION 

I  had  the  honor  of  knowing  Mr.  Baldwin,  the 
founder  of  this  lectureship.  The  first  object 
he  had  in  mind  was  to  aid  the  religious  life 
of  the  students  of  this  university ;  and  it  is 
because  I  hope  to  be  of  some  small  service  to 
you,  young  men  and  women,  and  not  because 
I  have  any  hope  of  adding  a  worthy  volume 
to  the  valuable  apologetic  library  which  this 
lectureship  is,  I  doubt  not,  destined  in  time 
to  produce,  that  I,  with  much  hesitation,  ven- 
tured to  accept  the  nomination  that  the  Bishop 
of  the  diocese  did  me  the  honor  to  make. 

I  never  was  a  scholar.  I  have  read  some- 
what widely.  I  have  seen  more  of  the  world, 
and  of  the  men  and  women  in  it,  than  most 
clergymen.  But  such  powers  of  memory  as  I 
possessed,  always  poor,  have  suffered  greatly 
in  latter  years,  owing  to  excessive  strain  and 
ill  health.  Thus  you  see  I  am  unusually  poorly 


x  INTRODUCTION 

furnished  to    fill   the    office  of  a  "learned" 
lecturer. 

Why,  then,  do  I  accept?  I  do  so  because, 
while  I  have  no  capacity  to  aid  the  scholar, 
I  hope  still  to  be  of  some  service  to  those 
who,  as  they  are  entering  on  life's  more 
thoughtful  stage,  find,  as  I  did  myself  many 
years  ago,  the  foundations  on  which  youth's 
rather  light-hearted  religious  structure  had 
been  hastily  builded,  crumbling  away  beneath 
their  feet.  The  clearest-eyed  among  us  sees 
but  dimly  through  life's  dark  glasses ;  but 
dim  as  these  eyes  must  be,  to  those  who  stead- 
ily seek  for  light,  gleams  do  now  and  then 
break  through  upon  our  stormy  sea.  Moments 
of  what  we  must  deem  "  insight "  are  given 
us,  when  all  things  around  and  within  us  are 
less  opaque.  When  we  travellers,  stumbling 
along  life's  hard  pathway,  are  sure  that  we 
see  a  light,  —  no  wide-shining  illumination, 
no  Bethlehem  star  even,  once  again  with  steady 
ray  pointing  to  the  manger  where  wisdom 
learned  to  worship  babyhood,  but  still  a  light 
wide  enough  and  clear  enough  to  help  us  to 


INTRODUCTION  xi 

order  our  steps  aright  —  when  such  visitations 
come  true,  then  do  we  rise  and  gird  up  our 
loins.  New  hope,  and  purpose,  and  courage, 
are  ours.  We  speak  to  our  fellow  travellers 
to  cheer  them,  or  we  even  sing,  as  I  have 
heard  tired  soldiers  sing,  as  they  made  long 
march  in  the  night. 

Well,  not  to  wander  too  aimlessly  and  too 
long,  I  have  had  such  experiences.  I  have 
seen  the  "  gleam "  and  stumblingly  have 
tried  to  rise  and  follow  it,  and  of  such  times 
and  efforts  I  have  tried  to  find  some  record. 
I  will  try  to  recall  what  I  saw  and  felt,  in  the 
hope  that  it  may  be  of  some  service  to  you, 
who  soon  are  setting  out  on  the  larger,  freer 
life  awaiting  those  whose  college  days  are  over. 

In  my  lectures  to  you  I  purpose  going  over 
old  ground.  Dealing  with  old  questions  which 
are  ever  the  newest  questions  of  all,  —  ques- 
tions that  down  here,  in  the  shadows  and 
mists  of  this  world  life,  can  never  receive  a 
full  or  satisfactory  answer.  Yet  since  each 
man  and  woman  of  us  all  must,  in  his  heart 
of  hearts,  make  some  sort  of  tentative  answer 


xii  INTRODUCTION 

to  them,  must  give  some  reason  to  his  own 
soul  for  the  faith  or  non-faith  that  is  in  him,  I 
venture  to  offer  you  the  poor  best  that  is  mine. 

I  was  brought  up  to  believe  that  on  those 
tremendous  doctrines  which  are  commonly 
known  as  the  fundamentals  of  our  religion, 
all  should  entertain  a  certainty,  should  at 
least  rejoice  in  a  "  sure  and  certain  hope."  I 
cannot  claim  to  have  won  any  such  faith. 
Such  hope  as  I  have  is  far  removed  from  cer- 
tainty. Nor  do  I  find,  among  my  fellow  pil- 
grims of  the  road,  that  their  assurances  are 
generally  of  a  higher  order  than  my  own. 

When  we  can  succeed  in  breaking  through 
those  conventions  that  so  effectively  muffle 
the  voices  of  our  hearts,  when  we  try  to  say 
to  each  other  what  we  really  feel, —  really 
mean, — at  such  times  Emerson's  statement 
of  our  human  limitations  fits  us  one  and  all :  — 


He  by  false  usage  pinned  about 
No  breath  within,  no  passage  out, 

Cast  wishful  glances  at  the  stars, 
And  wishful  saw  the  ocean  stream  : 


INTRODUCTION  xiii 

"  Merge  me  in  the  brute  universe, 
Or  lift  to  a  diviner  dream !  " 

The  divine  within  us  makes  surrender  to 
the  brute  an  ultimate  torture.  The  brute 
within  us  plucks  the  pinion  feather  from  our 
souls'  wings  as  they  seek  to  bear  us  above  the 
steaming  flats  and  valleys  of  sense. 

Sometimes  we  are  sure  our  feet  are  on  the 
king's  highway,  and  the  first  thing  we  know 
we  find  ourselves  fast  by  the  heels  in  Doubt- 
ing Castle,  and  all  view  of  the  Delectable 
Mountains  by  the  dark  enclosing  walls  cut 
off. 

Such  is  the  experience  of  the  majority  of 
men  who  are  thoughtful,  and  who  try  to  do 
right.  Such  has  been  my  experience,  at  any 
rate,  and  as  I  speak  to  you,  I  shall  at  least 
try  not  to  profess  an  order  of  faith  I  do  not 
enjoy,  or  an  assurance  I  do  not  possess.  I 
shall  try  to  say  what  I  feel  and  believe,  and  no 
more.  For  I  have  noticed  that  few  things  are 
more  hurtful  to  the  cause  of  real  religion  to- 
day than  the  habit  of  exaggeration  into  which 
good  people  sometimes  fall  as  they  seek  to  aid 


xiv  INTRODUCTION 

the   faith  of    others   by  grossly  overstating 
their  own. 

When  circumstances  arose  which  made  the 
apostles  of  old  look  fearfully  toward  an  un- 
certain and  dangerous  future,  their  spokesman 
cried,  "  Lord,  to  whom  shall  we  go  ?  thou 
hast  the  words  of  eternal  life."  Sure  it  is 
that  the  intervening  ages  have  given  no  re- 
sponse to  that  query  —  if  Jesus  cannot  help 
us,  no  one  else  can.  It  is  a  matter  of  history 
that  Jesus  did  most  wonderfully  inspire  those 
men.  It  is  a  matter  of  fact  that  he  can  and 
does  comfort,  guide,  and  inspire  those  who 
seek  him  to-day.  Of  this  much  I  am  sure.  I 
believe  it  with  all  my  heart.  I  have  seen  it 
proved,  again  and  again,  in  the  lives  of  many 
people  I  have  been  privileged  to  know  inti- 
mately. 

So  I  beg  you  to  come  with  me  and  see  if 
duty's  path  may  not  grow  plainer  to  you,  and 
your  life's  burden  lighter,  as  you  try  to  set 
your  will  to  understand  and  accept  his  reason- 
able service. 

W.  S.  Rainsford. 


THE   REASONABLENESS 
OF  THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS 


THE  REASONABLENESS 
OF  THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS 


THE  REASONABLENESS    AND    NECESSITY    OF 
GROWTH    AND    CHANGE    IN    RELIGION 

In  my  trouble  I  have  prepared  for  the  house  of  the  Lord  an 
hundred  thousand  talents  of  gold ;  .  .  .  thou  mayest  add  thereto. 
—  1  Chron.  xxn,  14. 

David  is  delivering  his  dying  charge  to  Sol- 
omon his  son.  David  may  be  considered  the 
founder  of  the  Israelitish  kingdom.  Perhaps 
it  is  no  unfair  historic  analogy  to  call  him  the 
King  Alfred  of  the  Jews.  The  qualities  that 
have  gone  to  make  that  imperishable  race 
great  were  embodied  in  David,  its  first  great 
king.  Great  were  David's  services  to  the  weak 
people  he  championed  and  led.  It  is  not  too 
much  to  say  that,  if  he  did  not  make  them  a 
nation,  he  saved  the  nation  from  merging, 
being  lost,  in  the  surrounding  and  conflicting 
tribes.  By  constant  warfare  he  won  them  free- 


4  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

dom  from  enemies  —  and  forced  on  them  a 
national  unity.  The  extraordinary  and  unique 
religious  genius  of  that  people  found  in  David 
one  of  its  earliest  and  best  expressions.  With 
him  the  richest  religious  poetry  our  race  has 
produced  began  to  assume  those  forms  which 
in  the  Psalms  are  immortal.  He  must  have 
sung  some  of  the  first  great  religious  Jewish 
songs,  and  though  we  are  unable  positively  to 
ascribe  to  him  any  of  the  Psalms  as  we  now 
have  them,  we  yet  know  that  his  commanding 
personality  had  so  stamped  itself  on  the  poetic 
literature  of  the  race  that  in  after  times  it  was 
natural  to  ascribe  to  the  warrior-poet  the  best 
of  them  all. 

The  true  poet  of  an  epoch  feels  and  is  swayed 
by  the  passions  of  his  time.  Those  times  were 
cruel ;  there  was  little  pity  shown  from  man  to 
man.  Men  were  lustful  and  unscrupulous,  and 
often  cruel,  lustful,  and  unscrupulous  was 
David  the  king.  Yet,  in  spite  of  much  wrong- 
doing, the  man  was  saved  by  that  divine  qual- 
ity, so  largely  possessed  by  the  great  Jews  of 
that  far-away  time  —  his  yearning  after  God. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  5 

He  may  not  have  penned  those  deathless 
lines  —  "My  soul  thirsteth  for  God,  for  the 
living  God:  when  shall  I  come  and  appear 
before  God?"  But  doubtless  some  such  long- 
ing it  was  that  impelled  him  to  build  a  temple 
that  should  permanently  enshrine  Jehovah's 
worship. 

Those  who  are  inspired  to  great  aims  must 
have  souls  stout  enough  to  endure  great  dis- 
appointments. It  is  not  given  to  the  truly 
great  to  have  here  their  heart's  desire.  So  runs 
the  story  of  the  painful  earth,  and  David's 
ambition  must  be  thwarted  just  when  it  is 
wisest  and  most  far-reaching.  His  political 
insight  taught  him  that  the  nation  he  had 
organized  must  have  its  beliefs  and  aspira- 
tions embodied  and  made  visible  in  a  temple. 
Such  a  central  meeting-place  would  cement 
the  still  but  partially  united  tribes;  would 
tend  to  educate  and  purify  the  religious  in- 
stincts of  the  people ;  would  serve  as  a  strong 
defence  against  encroaching  idolatries,  and  at 
the  same  time  prove  the  best  possible  bulwark 
for  his  throne. 


6  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

His  political  as  well  as  his  religious  genius, 
then,  urged  on  the  building  of  the  great  tem- 
ple ;  and  if  he  may  not  accomplish  the  work 
he  has  so  nobly  planned  for,  it  shall  be  Solo- 
mon's first  care.  "  I  in  my  trouble,  in  times 
of  war,  mid  a  reign  of  blood,  have  ever  held 
before  me  the  one  great  aim  — such  provisions 
I  have  made.  I  have  done  what  I  can.  Thou, 
0  Solomon,  mayest  add  thereto."  The  long 
past  veils  from  our  eyes  that  golden  temple 
and  its  worshipping  throngs.  What  was  there 
said  and  sung  is  but  a  legend  to  us.  But  the 
reality  and  worth  of  it  are  unquestionable. 
David's  foresight  and  Solomon's  magnificence 
gave  shape  and  expression  to  Jewish  mono- 
theism. 

We  owe  much  to  the  beauty-loving  Greeks ; 
we  owe  much  to  the  law-making  Romans ;  but 
more,  far  more  do  we  owe  to  the  God-loving 
Jews.  Vitalized,  purified  by  the  God-desire, 
round  that  temple  grew  a  national  life  whose 
persistence  is  the  wonder  of  all  history,  suc- 
cessfully resisting  those  forces  of  disintegra- 
tion that  shattered  and  scattered  nations  far 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  7 

mightier  than  they.  A  national  poetry  grew 
up  there,  far  the  best  religious  poetry  the 
world  has  ever  seen.  And  a  legal  code  was 
given  to  men,  embodying  social  and  religious 
ideals  immensely  in  advance  of  any  other  we 
know  of,  at  least  in  the  Western  world.  Yes, 
the  more  the  religious  history  of  the  world 
comes  to  be  known,  the  greater  the  debt  of 
mankind  to  the  Jew  appears.  To  him  we  owe 
a  literature  that  still  may  be  said  to  embody 
the  wisdom  and  hopes  of  our  race.  It  is  but  a 
truism  to  say  that  the  Jewish  religion  had  in 
it  the  capacity  to  grow,  to  change,  to  adapt 
itself.  It  took  in  many  things  from  many  peo- 
ples (probably  the  belief  in  life  for  man  be- 
yond the  grave,  from  the  Persians).  It  assim- 
ilated them,  and  was  not  assimilated  by  them. 
It  could  and  did  develop  into  Christianity. 
But  where  lay  the  secret  of  this  power  of 
growth  and  development  ?  What  had  this  re- 
ligion, held  by  these  puny  tribes,  in  it  that 
the  religions  of  far  greater  and  more  culti- 
vated peoples  lacked?  I  think  I  am  right  in 
pointing  out  one  great  vital  quality  it  had  that 


8  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

made  it  a  growing  religion,  a  religion  that 
from  its  very  nature  would  voice  itself  in  new 
psalms,  new  poetry,  new  religious  and  moral 
teachings  of  preacher  prophets,  who  looked 
out  keenly  on  men  and  the  times,  and  saw, 
with  a  real  illumination,  what  duty  for  them- 
selves and  for  their  fellows  meant. 

That  one  priceless  quality  possessed  by  Jew- 
ish monotheism  was  a  steadfast  determina- 
tion to  explain  life  in  terms  of  God.  The 
God  of  David  and  Solomon,  the  God  of  the 
exiles  and  of  the  great  Isaiahs,  was  more  than 
intensely  interested  in  man's  life.  He  was  no 
Jupiter,  sitting  far  aloft,  moved  only  to  occa- 
sional interest  in  the  struggling  life  of  men. 
He  was  with  his  people,  cheering,  guiding, 
chastening,  rewarding ;  they,  as  it  were,  made 
visible  on  earth  his  will ;  their  success  was  his 
glory ;  their  shame  and  fall  involved  humilia- 
tion for  him.  His  word  was  their  law;  his 
honor  their  honor ;  he  was  a  God  who  cared. 
Of  course  so  exalted  a  conception  of  God  was 
not  born  in  a  day.  The  god  of  the  earliest 
days  was  a  narrower,  more  merely  tribal  god, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  9 

than  the  god  of  later  enlightened  times.  Men 
never  have  conceived  and  never  can  conceive 
of  God  other  than  as  a  mighty  man.  This  is 
one  of  the  well-established  limitations  of  hu- 
man thought,  quite  as  evident  in  our  latest 
philosophies  as  in  the  discarded  ideals  of  the 
great  men  of  long  ago. 

These  Jews  were  cruel.  The  race  meant 
nothing  to  them ;  their  tribe  everything.  The 
only  god  they  were  therefore  capable  of  wor- 
shipping was  at  times  cruel  and  narrow,  and 
tribal  like  themselves ;  was  for  them  and 
against  all  others.  Yet  steadily,  wonderfully, 
their  idea  of  God  grew  in  beauty,  purity,  and 
spiritual  power,  till  the  merely  tribal  god 
vanished,  and  in  his  place  we  see  with  wonder 
standing  the  God  of  the  whole  earth ;  a  god 
to  love  as  truly  as  to  fear;  a  god  whose  high 
and  holy  law  reached  far  above  the  attain- 
ments of  the  best  of  men.  That  idea  held  the 
Jew  to  his  best.  Did  he  stray  from  it  for  a 
time  and  fall,  then  some  new  poet,  some  new 
voice  of  warning  or  of  prophecy  was  heard, 
and  true  religion  was  revived  again. 


10  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

Men's  thoughts  widen  with  the  process  of 
the  suns,  and  so  widening,  first  outgrow,  and 
then  cast  aside,  the  older  religious  ideals  that 
have  been  produced  by  them.  This  process, 
of  course,  is  evident  in  the  history  of  Jewish 
religion.  And  if  the  various  parts  of  its 
matchless  literature,  which  we  call  the  Old 
Testament,  were  better  arranged  than  they 
are  at  present  in  the  common  Bible  we  read, 
this  gradual  discarding  of  old  ideas,  and  their 
replacement  by  new,  would  be  much  more 
evident  than  it  is.  Contrasting  with  the  merely 
tribal  god  of  the  Exodus,  let  me  quote  a  pas- 
sage that  gives  us  the  God  of  the  later  Psalms. 
Leave  out  one  or  two  lines  in  this  marvellous 
poem,  and  not  among  all  the  prayers  that  in 
all  the  ages  inspired  men  have  raised  to  God 
can  be  found  anything  more  exquisite  in  its 
adoration,  more  beautiful,  more  inspiring  :  — 

Whither  shall  I  go  from  thy  spirit  ?  or  whither 
shall  I  flee  from  thy  presence  ? 

If  I  ascend  up  into  heaven,  thou  art  there  :  if  I 
make  my  bed  in  hell,  behold,  thou  art  there. 

If  I  take  the  wings  of  the  morning,  and  dwell  in 
the  uttermost  parts  of  the  sea, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  11 

Even  there  shall  thy  hand  lead  me,  and  thy  right 
hand  shall  hold  me. 

How  precious  also  are  thy  thoughts  unto  me, 
O  God  !  how  great  is  the  sum  of  them ! 

Search  me,  O  God,  and  know  my  heart ;  try  me, 
and  know  my  thoughts  : 

And  see  if  there  be  any  wicked  way  in  me,  and 
lead  me  in  the  way  everlasting.1 

It  is  this  unique  power  of  growth,  of  ex- 
panding with,  and  possessing  itself  of,  the 
widening  views  of  man,  which  has  made  the 
Jewish  religion  immortal.  Nor  do  I  believe 
that  even  now  its  vitality  has  quite  passed 
away.  Modern  Judaism  may  seem  to  many 
dry  and  seedless;  capable  of  producing  no 
new  religious  ideals,  having  lost  its  adapta- 
bility. But  the  extraordinary  thing  about 
Judaism  is  that,  speaking  generally,  it  has  not 
given  birth  to  crude  and  harmful  religious 
movements  as  have  other  religions.  For  a 
long  time  its  stem  may  seem  dry  and  lifeless. 
It  has  not  at  least  burst  forth  into  evil  flower 
and  corrupt  fruit.  We  Christians  are  too 
hasty  in  concluding  that  that  race  to  whom 
1  Ps.   cxxxix,  7,  8,  9,  10,  1 7,  23,  24. 


12  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

our  religious  debt  is  so  unspeakably  great  has 
seen  its  last  vision,  has  given  forth  its  last 
message.  The  path  of  the  religious  Jew  is  not 
our  path  to-day.  Christian  orthodoxy  still 
despises  him  and  it.  Still,  at  least,  the  shadows 
of  the  ignorant  animosities  of  long  ago  cling 
to  him.  Once  he  made  a  fatal  mistake,  it  is 
true ;  but  has  Christianity  always  chosen 
rightly?  Surely  few  unprejudiced  students  of 
history  would  say  as  much.  In  the  cult  of  the 
Virgin  and  of  the  saints,  both  East  and  West 
have  widely  departed  from  the  religion  of 
Jesus  and  of  the  earlier  day.  Nay,  surely  the 
time  has  come  when  Protestantism  must  admit 
that  in  claiming  for  the  Bible  inerrancy,  and 
making  that  book  the  sole  test  of  truth,  it 
has  greatly  erred. 

If,  as  we  must  believe,  the  time  approaches 
(God  in  his  mercy  grant  it  may  come  soon) 
when  all  good  men  everywhere  will  recognize 
the  need  of  subordinating,  I  do  not  say  elim- 
inating, all  creeds,  when  good  men  every- 
where, feeling  their  need  of  God  in  this  world, 
shall  turn  towards  good  men  with  outstretched 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  13 

hands,  may  it  not  then  come  to  pass  that  the 
Jew,  to  whom  above  all  others  religion  owes 
its  greatest  debt  in  the  past,  may  prove  cap- 
able and  willing  to  aid  effectively  in  that 
great  getting  together  which  the  future  has 
in  store  for  us? 

If  you  have  followed  me  so  far,  you  already 
see  the  point  I  desire  to  press  on  you  in  these 
lectures  that  I  am  to  deliver.  It  is  this :  The 
genius  and  germ  of  a  world  religion  were 
present  even  in  early  Judaism,  because  that 
religion  was  from  the  beginning  committed 
to  an  explanation,  first  of  a  small  tribe's  life, 
later  of  man's  life,  in  terms  of  God.  They 
were  but  men,  these  Jews,  and  so  their  reli- 
gious vision  often  grew  dim.  They  were  nar- 
row-minded, —  so  were  all  men  then,  —  and 
their  religion  might  be  narrow;  a  religion 
depended  on  a  law,  a  priesthood,  or  a  book. 
But  their  monotheism  had  within  it  that 
which  was  destined  to  burst  through  and 
overpass  all  the  temporary  barriers  that  hu- 
man   ignorance   employs  to  dim  the  light  of 


14  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

God  in  the  soul.  It  was  to  prove  itself  the 
mustard  seed,  least  of  all  seeds,  from  which 
man's  highest  and  purest  concepts  of  God 
have  sprung.  It  made  God  responsible  for  the 
soul  of  man.  It  dared  to  believe  that  human 
life  was  actually  a  breath  of  God  in  its  be- 
ginning, an  honoring  and  serving  of  God 
in  its  course,  and  a  returning  to  God  at  its 
close.  Surely  this  was  high  thinking,  indeed, 
for  those  men  of  old  time.  Theirs  was  a  vis- 
ion far  clearer  than  that  given  to  any  other 
sons  of  men.  Theirs  was  a  mighty  faith;  and 
bravely  and  continuously  they  looked  to  God, 
the  God  of  the  life  of  men,  to  justify  it  and 
to  vindicate  them.  Surely  they  did  not  look 
in  vain.  Their  miraculous  survival  till  to-day 
is  that  great  faith's  best  vindication.  They 
gave  to  mankind  Jesus  the  Christ,  and  alone 
among  the  nations  of  his  time  they  survive 
to  witness  his  world-wide  victory. 

Now  it  must  be  apparent  that  if  we  can 
thus  think  of  our  religion,  then  our  thinking 
is  fully  in  accord  with  the  thoughts  of  men 
busied  in  other  departments  of  knowledge  and 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  15 

speculation.  The  order  of  the  universe  as  it  is 
conceived  of  to-day  is  an  order  of  progress 
and  of  growth.  If  religion  is  not  a  settled, 
stablished,  changeless  thing,  but  a  sense  of 
duty,  a  vision  of  the  great  source  of  all  law 
and  duty,  that  changes  and  grows  clearer 
from  age  to  age,  then  religious  thinking  fits 
in  admirably  with  man's  modern  knowledge 
and  modern  methods  of  adding  to  this  know- 
ledge; and  the  idea  that  true  science  and  true 
religion  ever  really  were  or  ever  can  be  at  war 
is  demonstrably  absurd.  Their  advocates  may 
have  fought  in  the  past  and  they  may  fight  in 
the  future  —  for  the  best  and  most  honest- 
hearted  of  us  are  at  times  warped  and  preju- 
diced; but  the  spirit  of  strife  helps  no  man 
up  the  hard  high  way,  by  which  alone  truth 
may  be  won. 

If  we,  then,  can  but  see  once  for  all  that 
there  are  not  two  ways  of  winning  truth  or 
gaining  its  great  goal,  but  only  one,  and  that 
that  way  is  an  old  way,  literally  as  old  as  the 
hills,  as  old  as  the  old  world's  order,  then 
surely  we  have  gained  something  that  is  well 


16  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

worth  while.  At  best  life  is  often  a  lonely 
business;  but  we  are  less  lonely  on  life's  path- 
way for  the  knowing  that  many  whom  we 
have  been  taught  to  think  of  as  in  "  another 
camp"  than  ours  are  really  only  in  another 
regiment  of  the  very  same  great  army,  and 
are  trying  to  do  just  what  we  know  we  must 
keep  trying  to  do,  too  —  namely,  add  our  lit- 
tle of  effort  or  discovery  to  what  is  worthy  in 
life's  slowly  growing  heap  of  things  that  shall 
endure. 

I  said  just  now  that  this  view  of  religion  is 
old  as  the  world's  order.  For  what  is  that  or- 
der? A  fire,  mist,  a  planet,  granite,  chalk, 
marl,  soil,  an  age-long  process,  as  the  result 
of  which  there  at  last  is  spread  over  the  cool- 
ing surface  of  our  world  a  thin  crust  of  soil, 
on  which  and  by  which  vegetable,  animal,  and 
then  human  life  may  subsist.  So  to  us  the 
very  crust  of  the  earth  seems  to  cry,  "  Come, 
0  man,  be  a  fellow  worker  with  me;  for  ages 
and  ages  I  have  been  preparing  myself  for 
you.  Now,  0  lord  of  creation,  take  up  bravely 
thine  own  subtler  tasks;  see  what  I  have  done 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  17 

to  prepare  myself  for  thy  lordship.  I  in  my 
trouble  have  so  much  wrought;  thou  may  est 
add  thereto/' 

As  we  dip  into  history  it  is  the  same  story. 
The  past  takes  voice,  the  forgotten  millions 
of  long  ago  who  have  gone  the  way  of  "  dusty 
death"  seem  to  cry,  "  We  fought,  we  bled,  we 
died,  to  win  for  you  the  comparative  calm  and 
prosperity  of  your  day.  Think  of  us  when  you 
work  and  are  discouraged.  Think  of  us  when 
you  plan  and  are  baffled.  Think  of  us  when 
you  falter  and  grow  weary.  Add  thou  thereto.' ' 

The  social  spirit  makes  the  same  appeal. 
The  people  that  have  come  or  are  coming  to 
us  come  from  many  different  nations  of  the 
earth.  They  are  far  from  being  the  least 
worthy  representatives  of  those  peoples.  It 
surely  takes  no  small  amount  of  courage  and 
of  energy  to  break  the  dear  ties  of  home  and 
fatherland  and  adventure  into  new  and  strange 
circumstances.  We  loudly  praise,  we  proudly 
acknowledge,  the  heroism  of  those  iron-souled 
men  and  women  who  first  sought  our  shores. 
But  we  too  often  fail  to  recognize  the  pluck 


18  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

and  self-denial  that  alone  enables  the  common 
emigrant  of  to-day  to  break  away  from  a  past 
he  knows  and  push  his  lonely  fortune  among 
strange  peoples  and  strange  lands. 

Believe  me,  it  is  not  the  weaklings  of  the 
world  who  are  adding  their  bloods  to  ours,  who 
are  bringing  their  muscles  and  their  energy 
to  the  solving  of  our  problems  and  the  devel- 
opment of  our  state.  These  are  tried  sol- 
diers. They  have  the  signs  and  scars  of  life's 
battle  on  them,  have  these  men  and  women 
and  little  children.  Honest,  charitable,  wise 
hosts  to  these  multitudes  we  are  called  to  be. 
Surely  to  no  people  did  the  social  spirit  ever 
more  clearly  appeal  than  to  us.  You  are  the 
children  of  the  emigrant.  More  than  two  hun- 
dred  and  fifty  years  ago  your  fathers  began 
to  come,  when  nothing  but  the  broad  rich 
breast  of  an  unexplored  continent  invited 
them ;  and  since  those  days  that  strenuous 
hopeful  tide  has  never  ceased  to  flow,  and 
your  comfort  and  your  wealth,  your  capacity 
and  education  to-day  are  the  fruits  and  results 
of  that  flowing.  Do  your  part.  It  is  not  the 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  19 

part  your  fathers  played.  The  wilderness  has 
vanished.  The  savage  is  now  scarcely  more  than 
a  name  by  which  lake,  river,  or  mountain  is 
known.  But  a  vast  free  country,  a  highly  or- 
ganized civilization  have  grown  up  as  if  by 
magic.  A  great  political  democracy  here  opens 
wide  its  gate  of  hope  and  promise  to  the 
world.  This  is  a  tremendous  thing  that  we 
profess  to  offer.  It  is  for  each  of  us  to  try  to 
make  the  promise  good. 

A  Croatian  peasant  had  made  his  way  to  an 
Adriatic  port.  "  Why,"  said  a  stranger  who 
happened  to  speak  his  language,  —  "  why  are 
you  leaving  your  fatherland  and  going  forth 
to  an  alien  people,  to  a  land  so  far  across  the 
sea?"  "I  go,"  said  he,  "to  see  if  there  is  a 
country  where  there  is  justice  between  man 
and  man."  Ah,  that  is  a  tremendous  thing  to 
ask  of  any  country,  in  which  poor  faulty  man, 
but  half  delivered  from  the  power  of  the  beast 
within  him,  lives  and  rules.  Yet  such  is  the 
unquenchable  and  growing  sense  of  righteous- 
ness in  us  that  we  will  not  be  contented  with 
even  the  poor  Croatian's  dream,  but  we  must 


20  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

add  to  it  the  warming  touch  of  brotherly  love 
that  alone  makes  dear  the  thought  of  home 
or  fatherland.  Yes,  mankind  evidently  ex- 
pects much  of  us.  And  it  is  our  high  calling, 
our  deep  religious  duty  not  to  disappoint  man- 
kind of  its  hope.  But  let  us  not  go  blindfold 
towards  the  future.  To  make  good,  all  that  is 
best  in  all  of  us  is  likely  to  be  taxed  to  the 
very  utmost. 

The  brave  pioneers  I  spoke  of,  even  the 
fighting  men  of  '61-65,  had  a  task  that  was 
simplicity  itself  compared  to  the  task  con- 
fronting us.  It  is  when  we  are  thoughtful, 
when  we  find  ourselves  sitting  down  and  try- 
ing to  do  what  Jesus  advised  men  to  do,  — 
count  the  cost  of  things,  and  try  our  souls 
to  see  if  we  are  ready  to  play  our  part,  able 
with  our  ten  thousand  to  meet  him  that  com- 
eth  against  us  with  twenty  thousand,  — it  is, 
I  say,  when  the  healthy  mood  is  on  us  that 
we  feel  our  real  resting-place  is  alone  found  in 
God ;  in  God  and  his  order ;  that  good  must 
win  in  the  end  because  it  is  good,  and  light 
overcome  the  darkness  because  it  is  light ;  that 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  21 

greater  is  He  that  is  with  us  than  all  that  can 
be  against  us ;  that  the  success  of  the  King- 
dom of  Heaven  depends  on  no  movement  in 
races  of  men,  but  on  the  very  nature  of  things. 

It  fortifies  my  soul  to  know 

That  though  I  perish,  truth  is  so ; 

That  howsoe'er  I  stray  and  range, 

Whate'er  I  do,  thou  dost  not  change. 

I  steadier  step  when  I  recall 

That,  though  I  slip,  thou  dost  not  fall. 

Yes,  God  back  of  the  nature  of  things 
makes  good.  "He  that  believeth  shall  not 
make  haste/'  says  the  old  Book.  And  the 
man  grasping  this  strong  consolation  is  not 
dismayed  or  disappointed  by  the  slow  grinding 
of  God's  grist,  nor  by  the  at  times  impercept- 
ible progress  of  what  we  call  civilization.  Civ- 
ilization rises  as  the  coral  islands  rise,  through 
dark  and  unrecorded  ages.  Gerald  Massey,  the 
poet  of  Chartist  days  in  England,  truly  said, 

We  rise  like  corals  grave  by  grave 
That  have  a  pathway  sunward. 

Down  in  the  dark  sea  depths  the  foundations 
of  future  life  and  beauty  are  slowly  laid. 
Each  generation  of  little  toilers  lives,  builds, 


22  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

dies,  and  broad  and  strong  the  foundations 
are  cemented  together.  Slowly  the  adamant 
building  mounts  to  the  upper  sunlit  waters, 
till  at  last  the  crispy,  creamy  spray  marks 
where  they  meet  the  sun.  To  all  the  winds 
and  forces  of  the  upper  world  the  little 
builders  seem  to  cry,  "  For  ages  and  ages  in 
the  darkness  we  have  toiled  and  died.  Now, 
add  ye  to  what  we  have  done." 

And  so  the  slow-growing  debris  of  ocean 
comes  "  and  adds  thereto,"  and  the  sea  birds 
come  and  "  add  thereto  "  —  and  the  grasses 
and  trees  come ;  and  at  last  comes  wandering, 
careless  man,  and  takes  the  sea  island  for  his 
home.  At  first  he  lives  an  almost  bestial  life, 
is  content  merely  to  exist.  The  shellfish  and 
the  nut  sustain  him ;  the  palm  leaf  or  the 
cave  give  him  shelter.  But  a  day  dawns  when 
mysteriously  the  spirit  of  the  great  Whole 
takes  voice  within  him ;  the  spirit  that  bade 
the  coral  insect  toil  in  the  salt,  sunless  gulfs 
of  the  sea,  that  made  the  bird  build,  and  the 
grass  grow  —  the  same  spirit  is  in  him,  and  in 
him  finds  a  voice. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  23 

He  begins  dimly  to  see  something  of  the 
meaning  of  it  all ;  the  age-long  voice  of  God, 
first  a  blind  instinct,  then  slowly  shaping  in 
the  dim  recesses  of  his  mind  an  idea  of  law. 
From  the  coral  beneath  his  feet,  from  the 
palm  tree  above  his  head,  from  the  surf's 
thunder  on  the  reef,  from  the  undiscovered 
depths  of  his  own  soul,  the  voice  comes.  "  We 
in  our  trouble  have  done  what  we  could.  0 
man,  Lord  of  creation,  thou  who  art  the  ex- 
planation and  justification  of  our  long  tra- 
vail, add  thou  thereto"  And  so  for  the  first 
time  the  song  of  the  world  becomes  articulate ; 
and  he  —  a  son  of  God,  for  whom  all  things 
have  so  long  waited  —  gathers  his  children 
round  him  as  life's  forces  fail  him,  and  says, 
"It  is  worth  while;  it  is  well  worth  while,  my 
children.  It  is  for  you  to  carry  forward  the 
cause  of  good.  Painful  ages  have  spent  them- 
selves in  preparing  the  way  you  are  called  to 
walk  in.  Lives  innumerable  struggled  and 
died  to  make  it  smooth.  The  very  soil  you  live 
by  is  one  mighty  grave.  The  very  ground  you 
tread  on  is  holy.  See,  then,  that  you  play 


24  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

your  part  in  building  the  temple  of  the  Lord." 

Ah,  true  it  is  — 

Our  lives  are  beautiful  through  drudgeries 

Of  those  who  gave  them  time  and  space  to  grow 

Through  generations  to  the  perfect  curve. 

Our  hair  has  got  the  gold,  because  the  dust 

Of  the  world's  highways  often  soiled  the  feet  of  our 

forefathers, 
And  the  blue-veined  hands  were  moulded  to  their 

tenderness  of  touch 
By  centuries  of  labor  rude  and  hard. 

As  I  conclude,  let  me  leave  the  general  as- 
pect of  this  question,  and  come  to  a  personal 
view  of  it.  There  are  few,  indeed,  of  us  who, 
as  we  allow  our  thoughts  to  search  the  past, 
do  not  recall,  it  may  be  with  something  of 
remorse,  yet  also  with  gratitude,  the  good, 
the  lovely,  the  loving  we  knew  long  ago.  Full 
well  we  know  that  any  good  thing  there  is  in 
us,  any  worthy  thing  we  have  accomplished, 
is  greatly  due  to  them:  fathers  and  mothers 
and  dear  friends  who  did  much,  and  suffered 
much,  to  make  us  better  than  we  promised  to 
be  —  to  give  us  a  prospect  of  truly  succeeding 
in  life.  Yes,  there  are  many  of  you  young 
people   listening  to  me  now  who  could  not 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  25 

possibly  have  hoped  to  enjoy  the  opportunities 
o£  a  great  university  had  not  those  who  loved 
you  slaved  and  denied  themselves  for  long 
cruel  years,  that  the  splendid  chance  that  now 
is  yours  might  be  won  for  you.  Ah,  the  best 
of  us  need  sometimes  to  be  reminded  of  these 
commonplaces  of  home  life.  Some  of  us  for- 
get them,  or  take  them  as  matters  of  course, 
for  it  is  sadly  possible  to  suffer  ideals  that 
kept  alive  faith  and  hope  and  the  confidence 
in  the  worth-while  of  life,  in  parents  whose 
circumstances  were  those  of  hardship,  to 
wither  away  and  fail  in  the  children  whose 
lives  are  lives  of  ease.  It  is  the  thought  of 
my  own  home  that  makes  me  speak  thus  to 
you  —  a  home  in  Ireland,  where  father  and 
mother  and  eight  little  children  lived  happily 
together  on  fifteen  hundred  dollars  a  year. 
Eight  mouths  to  feed,  bodies  to  clothe,  and 
minds  to  educate,  on  that  modest  sum.  If  we 
had  anything  nice  to  eat  —  or  unusually  good 
to  cover  us  —  it  was  because  they  denied 
themselves.  We  had  beautiful  scenery  at  our 
doors,  and  beautiful  flowers  in  our  garden. 


26  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

My  father's  roses  were  famous,  and  as  a  treat 
I  was  allowed  to  help  my  mother  in  her  gar- 
den, where,  during  summer,  she  was  busy 
long  before  my  early  school  hour  of  seven 
o'clock.  Brave  in  spirit  but  frail  in  body  was 
our  mother,  and  pain  long  and  hard  claimed 
her  while  we  were  yet  very  young.  So  we 
went  forth  into  the  wide  world  each  to  fight 
his  way,  and  realized  little,  indeed,  how  great 
was  our  debt  to  that  little  vicarage  home,  or 
to  those  who  had  made  it  so  soft  and  warm  a 
resting-place  for  the  young  brood.  Ah,  and 
then  —  death  broke  up  the  circle,  and  she 
who  was  its  central  power  was  gone,  and  we 
could  only  think  of  things,  and  wish  we  had 
but  thought  them  sooner,  so  that  we  might 
have  said  them.  For  it  is  poor  and  unsatisfac- 
tory business  to  think  loving  things  of  those 
we  owe  everything  to,  and  then  to  lock  up 
our  thoughts  in  our  breasts,  so  none  is  the 
wiser.  Undignified  talking  this  for  a  univers- 
ity lecturer,  yet,  since  it  is  true,  though  God 
knows  how  small  a  part  of  the  truth,  it  shall 
stand.  Perhaps  it  may  help  some  here  to  a 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  27 

step  they  never  surely  will  regret;  help  you 
to  cast  false  shyness  and  shame  aside,  and  go 
to  some  in  whose  debt  you  heavily  are,  and 
do  what  you  can,  not  to  discharge  it,  —  that 
cannot  be, — but  at  least  to  acknowledge  it. 

Of  ourselves  we  have  done  very  little ;  all 
intelligent  people  are  beginning  to  recognize 
this.  Yet  the  false,  ignorant  spirit  of  conceit 
and  brag  is  with  us  still.  "  I  am  what  I  am 
because  I  won  my  own  success.  I  won  life's 
game  off  my  own  bat.  I  have  made  good." 
Words  still  too  common,  alas !  The  words  of 
an  ignorant  and  ungrateful  fool. 

"  I  know  what  I  know  because  I  studied 
long  and  hard.  I  have  searched  and  found 
what  I  needed,  what  I  sought."  No  true 
scholar  speaks  thus.  He  knows  too  well  that 
it  is  to  the  study  of  others,  often  of  forgotten 
and  unrewarded  men,  that  he  owes  such  little 
light  of  uncertain  knowledge  as  may  illumine 
the  semi-darkness  of  his  mind.  "  I  have  what 
I  have  because  I  earned  it.  I  will  do  what  I 
will  with  my  own."  Enlightened  sense  of  com- 


28  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

mon  justice  is  fast  hastening  to  take  this  last 
sort  of  fool  by  the  throat,  and  if  common 
sense  cannot  teach  him  his  folly  and  dishon- 
esty, common  law  surely  will. 

We  are  only  dusty  soldiers  in  a  great  army 
on  a  long,  long  march;  we  advance  and  re- 
treat, sway  onward,  bend  backward  in  an  age- 
long struggle ;  little  coral  insects  building,  in 
darkness  and  storm,  the  living  places  of  the 
far  future.  We  need  religion  or  we  shall  not 
believe  in  the  worth-whileness  of  it  all.  And 
we,  lacking  it,  will  stray  from  the  marching 
line  to  grasp  at  flowers  that  wither,  or  to  seize 
on  dangerous  fruits  that  decay  and  turn  to 
dust.  And  the  religion  we  must  have  must  be 
a  religion  justifying  man's  life  on  this  earth, 
and  giving  some  insight  as  to  earth's  meaning. 
Here  and  now  it  must  help  us  see  that  good- 
ness is  worth  the  trouble  it  costs  ;  that  we  are 
in  honor  bound  to  aim  for  the  highest.  We 
shall  not  always  see  this.  We  may  stray  from 
the  marching  line,  to  gather  the  flowers,  to 
surfeit  ourselves  on  the  fruit;  but  then  such 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  29 

excursions  are  things  to  blush  for,  are  deser- 
tions of  good  comrades,  and  bring  danger  to 
them  and  shame  to  ourselves.  I  believe  such  a 
reasonable  and  necessary  religion  Jesus  Christ 
brought  to  men.  More  than  that,  I  believe 
that  he  is  revealing  such  a  religion  to  us  to- 
day ;  that  even  now  he  speaks  to  the  toilers, 
the  truth-seekers,  the  lovers  of  good,  the  piti- 
ful, the  brave,  everywhere ;  that  not  only  to 
those  who  make  a  success  of  their  struggle 
after  better  things,  but  to  the  vastly  larger 
number  who  make  what  seems  a  failure  of  it, 
he  speaks. 

If  this  is  true,  how,  then,  account  for  the 
discouragement  and  division  so  evident  to-day 
in  the  Christian  churches?  Discouragement  is 
surely  not  generally  in  the  air.  In  all  other  de- 
partments of  life  there  is  no  lack  of  buoyancy 
and  confidence.  There  is  a  very  general  con- 
sciousness that  we  are  accomplishing  some- 
thing, that  we  are  adding  to  the  achievements 
of  our  fathers,  that  we  are  "making  good." 
Knowledge  advances  with  leaps  and  bounds. 
We  are  uncovering  some  of  Nature's  secrets. 


30  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

We  are  using  her  beneficent  resources  to  over- 
come or  mitigate  the  pains  and  penalties  she 
has  for  so  long  laid  remorselessly  on  us.  Hope- 
fully, confidently,  we  are  learning  to  face  our 
problems  and  to  prepare  for  our  future. 

Can  we  truthfully  claim  that  this  is  reli- 
gion's attitude  also  ?  I  fear  we  cannot ;  at  least 
in  so  far  as  the  orthodox  churches  express  for 
us  religion.  In  the  churches  a  spirit  of  doubt, 
disheartenment,  and  division  is  too  evident, 
and  one  of  its  chief  causes  I  hold  to  be  this, 
the  churches'  fear  of  change.  They  always 
have  feared  it,  and  that  fear,  harmful  and 
limiting  as  it  has  proved  in  the  (shall  I  call 
them?)  dormant  ages,  is  doubly  so  in  times' 
like  our  own,  when  a  rush  of  new  ideas,  a  tor- 
rent of  life,  sweeps  through  the  veins  of  man- 
kind. The  churches  are  dismayed  by  the 
clamorous  demands  made  on  them  both  from 
within  and  from  without  their  borders.  They 
are  in  danger  of  forgetting  the  very  nature 
of  the  truth  they  only  exist  to  conserve  and 
reveal,  namely,  no  religion  can  help  or  inspire 
man  when  it  ceases  to  explain  his  life  in  terms 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  31 

of  God.  It  is  cold  comfort  to  the  scholar  to 
believe  that  his  forbears  worshipped  God  as 
they  pursued  their  studies,  but  as  for  him  he 
must  make  choice  between  his  studies  and  his 
father's  God.  The  spirit  of  timidity  is  the  very 
last  spirit  that  can  accomplish  any  worthy 
thing  to-day.  Scholarship  advances  every- 
where with  joy.  Its  confident  joy  is  its 
strength.  In  all  departments  of  man's  search- 
ing he  goes  forth  bravely  to  seek  the  truth, 
assured  that  the  truth  is  a  good  thing,  and 
well  worth  the  seeking;  that  pain  and  self- 
denial  are  well  endured  if  he  but  win  a  tiny 
grain  of  truth,  to  be  reverently  added  to  the 
slowly  mounting  heap  of  man's  acquirement. 
The  religious  searcher  after  truth,  or  rather, 
I  should  say,  the  student  who  remains  in  the 
pale  of  orthodoxy,  is  alone  hampered.  Voices 
that  speak  with  authority,  and  other  voices, 
at  least  as  urgent,  who  have  no  authorization 
at  all,  alike  bid  him  to  be  careful.  "  You  may 
search  where  you  like,"  they  cry,  "but  beware 
that  you  only  find  what  we  approve  (who  our- 
selves have   no  time    or   ability   to    search). 


32  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

Otherwise  you  must  leave  our  company ;  you 
must  take  your  place  outside  the  pale  of  or- 
ganized Christianity." 

It  is  all  wrong,  terribly  wrong.  Religion 
and  life  are  one.  There  are  no  two  kinds  of 
truth.  There  are  no  two  ways  of  finding 
truth.  And  if  in  a  time  when  life  is  changing, 
greatly,  gloriously,  religion  hesitates  to  change 
too,  then  life  and  religion  must,  temporarily 
at  least,  take  different  roads  and  part  company, 
and  that  means  the  saddening:  of  life  and  the 
withering  of  religion. 

It  is,  then,  to  the  inevitableness  and  reason- 
ableness of  change  in  our  religious  beliefs,  as 
in  every  other  department  of  our  lives,  that  I 
am  now  going  to  call  your  attention.  Jesus 
was  a  profound  believer  in  change,  he  himself 
proclaimed  momentous  changes,  yet  every- 
thing he  taught  was  rooted  in  and  sprang  from 
the  past.  Change,  he  said,  was  not  necessarily 
the  destruction  of  the  past,  but  the  fulfilment 
of  it.  The  nature  of  truth  everywhere  is  the 
same  —  it  is  seed;  and  seed  must  die  that  it 
may  grow,  and  change  that  it  may  live. 


THE   RELIGION   OF  JESUS  33 


II 


JESUS'  DOCTRINE   OF  THE   SEED:   THE   METHOD 
OF  GROWTH  AND  CHANGE 


Jesus  said,  "  So  is  the  Kingdom  of  God,  as  if  a  man  should  cast 
seed  into  the  ground  ;  .  .  .  and  the  seed  should  spring  and  grow 
up,  he  knoweth  not  how.  For  the  earth  bringeth  forth  fruit  of 
herself."  —  Mark  iv,  26-28. 

I  said  the  Jewish  religion  was  an  effort  to 
explain  life  in  terms  of  God ;  life  as  they  saw 
it ;  to  justify  life  as  they  knew  it.  That  is  what 
a  real  religion  must  ever  attempt  to  do  if  it 
would  live  at  all. 

From  the  nature  of  things  such  a  religion 
is  committed  to  change.  Its  advocates  and  de- 
fenders may  forget,  and  often  have  forgotten 
this,  may  and  often  do  fiercely  deny  and  re- 
sent it,  but  the  inevitable  fact  remains.  For 
what  is  life  ?  Life  is  an  open  book  in  which 
each  generation  of  men  writes  its  own  story, 
and  that  story  is  completely  different  from 
all  the  stories  that  have  preceded  it.  Life  is 


34  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

a  great  building,  rising  as  the  coral  islands 
rose  — 

We  rise  like  corals  grave  by  grave 

That  have  a  pathway  sunward. 

Each  generation,  each  race  of  men  adds  its 
course  of  stone  or  brick  or  perishable  rubble 
to  what  other  builders  have  built  before  it. 
The  problems  of  each  decade  change.  If  re- 
ligion only  affords  answers  to  the  questions 
of  days  gone  by,  men  living  in  a  vital  present 
will  soon  cease  to  question  it.  So  much  is 
evident,  surely. 

There  are  those  who  are  quick  to  recognize 
this  need  of  flexibility  in  religious  formulae, 
and  at  the  same  time  profess  themselves  dis- 
tressed at  the  doubtfulness  and  uncertainty 
that  often  characterizes  the  best  religious 
teaching  they  have  access  to.  This  is  not  a 
reasonable  position  to  take.  Eeal  religion, 
true  to  its  best  ideals,  bending  all  its  energy 
to  illumine  and  explain  life's  tragedies  and 
mysteries,  must  of  necessity  halt,  hesitate,  and 
change,  just  because  life  halts  and  changes. 
It  should  be  scarcely  necessary  to  do  more 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  S5 

than  state  this  fact,  to  commend  its  reason- 
ableness and  necessity ;  but  surely  it  is  often 
quite  forgotten  by  those  who  should  know 
better.  Consider  our  own  national  life — free 
beyond  compare,  unburdened,  unsaddened 
by  the  tragic  and  costly  pasts  that  other  na- 
tions have  known.  These  others  may  advance 
hardily  into  the  future,  yet  they  are  encum- 
bered with  debts  to  be  discharged.  They  are 
as  men  no  longer  young,  seamed  and  scarred 
by  wounds  that  have  not  only  left  indelible 
marks,  but  have  drained  away  much  of  their 
vigor  and  national  energy.  The  mistakes  and 
sins  of  other  times  lie  heavily  on  the  freest 
of  them.  But  we !  We  have  only  our  own 
brief  problems  to  solve,  our  own  hastily  con- 
tracted debts  to  pay,  and  yet  they  are  quite 
sufficient  to  give  us  cause  for  thoughtfulness. 
Freest,  youngest,  richest,  strongest  of  the 
nations  we  are,  yet  we  have  our  problems, 
and  they  can  only  be  successfully  met  in  a 
spirit  of  confident  faith  in  God  and  man.  In 
that  faith  we  may  rejoice  in  our  past,  glory 
in  what  our  forefathers  won  of  freedom  and 


36  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

unity,  but  we  surely  cannot  continue  to  grow 
or  to  prosper  if  our  eyes  are  chiefly  directed 
to  the  past.  Questions  of  to-day  press  on  us 
that  must  be  answered;  duties  that  must  be 
done.  Do  we  falter  before  them  because  we 
cannot  be  always  certain  of  the  best  and  wisest 
thing  to  do,  the  straightest  course  to  take? 
In  these  social  matters,  there  is  no  one  author- 
itative voice  to  answer  oracularly  our  ques- 
tion; no  one  inspired  leader  to  tell  us  how  to 
accomplish  our  duty.  No,  up  and  down  the 
land  these  things  must  be  debated — in  work- 
shop and  in  Wall  Street ;  in  university,  lec- 
ture-hall, and  labor-union  meeting;  and  in 
these,  many  conclusions  are  arrived  at,  many 
halting  and  sometimes  conflicting  theories  ad- 
vanced. Yet,  since  we  believe  that  men  gen- 
erally are  trying  to  see  straight  and  do  right, 
we  believe  that  out  of  the  babel  and  confusion 
a  clearer  vision  of  duty,  a  stride  forward  in 
social  progress,  will  in  time  be  won.  So  we 
do  not  wait  for  an  infallible  leadership,  but 
follow  such  light  as  we  have,  attempting 
bravely  to  do  the  thing  that  comes  next  to  hand. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  37 

So  much  is  evidently  true  of  our  national 
life,  and  since  it  is  true,  we  are  not  at  all 
dismayed  if  we  see  that  great  human  column 
of  the  nation's  progress  at  times  sway,  at 
times  seem  to  stop  and  crumble  away  at  the 
head,  as  it  storms  onward  on  life's  battle-field. 
"Such  is  life,"  we  say.  Only  by  struggle, 
by  fierce  contrast  and  comparison  can  the 
best  in  ideas  or  the  best  in  men  win  out,  and 
be  approved  as  fittest  to  last  and  survive. 

Yes,  such  is  life's  law  of  progress,  and 
truth's  law.  Such  is  the  law  of  all  brave  ad- 
venture, and  of  all  true  discovery,  and  such 
must  be  religion's  law  too.  To  separate  reli- 
gion from  these,  to  demand  for  it  another  and 
a  different  order  of  progress,  is  fatal  to  its 
vitality,  is  fatal  to  its  final  acceptance  by 
thinking  men.  Yet  good  men  are  ever  forget- 
ting this,  and  Jesus  sought  to  remind  them 
of  it  when  he  gave  forth  his  great  doctrine 
of  the  Seed. 

Jesus  as  a  teacher  found  himself  confronted 
by  an  immense  development  of  religious  ideas 
that    had  grown  up   round  the  simple  and 


38  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

earlier  faith  of  his  race.  There  was  nothing 
extraordinary  in  this ;  nay,  it  was  natural  and 
necessary.  Growth  and  addition  are  an  evi- 
dence of  life.  "Add  thou  thereto"  is  the 
voice  of  every  living  faith.  It  is  a  truism  of 
religious  history  to  say  that,  so  soon  as  in 
any  religion  signs  of  growth  and  addition 
fail,  that  religion  is  decaying,  and  must  soon, 
in  the  nature  of  things,  take  its  place  among 
the  vast  number  of  forgotten  beliefs  that 
flourished  but  for  a  time.  These  growths  are 
like  the  branches  of  a  tree.  Some  will  endure 
all  stress  of  storm  and  sun,  be  incorporated 
in  the  tree,  and  live  in  its  life  so  long  as  the 
tree  lives;  and  some  have  not  enough  vitality 
to  endure,  but  fall  or  are  cut  away,  and  the 
tree  lives  on  without  them,  and  is  the  better 
for  the  parting. 

Now  a  time  had  arrived  in  the  religious  life 
of  Judaism  when  these  accumulations  had  to 
be  dealt  with.  A  house-cleaning  of  the  faith 
was  due,  and  Jesus  felt  that  this  heavy  and 
thankless  task  was  laid  on  him.  The  life  of 
the  spirit  was  in  Judaism  still,  but  so  overlaid 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  39 

by  the  garments  men  had  woven  to  protect  it, 
so  hidden  by  the  pictures  they  had  painted  to 
explain  it,  that  garments  or  pictures  were  by 
the  multitude  taken  for  the  vital  realities 
themselves. 

Jesus  constantly  proclaims  that  true  religion 
is  a  growing  thing.  He  will  give  place  to  no 
man  in  honoring  the  men  by  whom  the  spirit 
of  the  ever-living  God  spake  in  the  times  of 
the  past;  but  he  believes  that  God  as  truly 
speaks  to  men  in  his  own  times  as  in  those 
great  days  of  long  ago.  And  more  than  that, 
he  believes  that  God  will  as  truly  continue  to 
speak  to  men  in  the  times  that  lie  beyond; 
that  those  who  come  after  him  will  see  clearer 
lights  and  do  greater  deeds  than  he.1 

Jesus  is  in  short  an  evolutionist.  He  will 
not  cast  himself  loose  from  the  past.  He 
knows  well,  he  ever  insists,  that  he  is  what  he 
is ;  he  knows  what  he  knows,  because  of  it. 
Instinctively  he  knows  that  all  true  develop- 
ment and  progress  are  out  of,  and  because  of, 
all  that  has  gone  before.  He  would  preserve, 

1  See  John  xiv,  12. 


40  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

not  destroy,  those  structures,  habits,  tenden- 
cies, which  have  proved  themselves  to  be  suit- 
able and  worthy.  Again  and  again  he  protests 
that  he  is  no  destroyer,  but  a  constructor. 
When  he  is  confronted  by  his  enemies,  among 
whom  are  numbered  the  most  religious  men 
of  the  time,  when  they  oppose  his  teaching 
and  accuse  him  of  heresy,  blasphemy,  and 
treason  to  the  cause  of  the  God  of  the  Jews, 
he  confounds  them  by  turning  to  the  old  writ- 
ings. The  law,  the  psalms,  the  prophets,  all 
in  turn  he  quotes  with  a  profound  knowledge, 
with  a  spiritual  insight  and  acumen  that  are 
astounding  and  convincing.  His  enemies  may 
know  the  letter  of  religion  and  of  its  record ; 
its  inner,  truer  meaning  lies  open  to  his  mind. 
His  opponents  are  often  convinced  and  gener- 
ally silenced. 

Yes,  the  life  of  the  spirit  was  in  Judaism 
still.  If  it  had  not  been  so,  then  Jesus'  pro- 
clamation and  vindication  of  it  against  the 
ritualists  would  have  quite  failed,  and  his  re- 
ligion would  have  died  with  him.  As  it  was, 
he  saved  the  precious  thing  beloved;  he  lifted 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  41 

it  up ;  he  glorified  and  enlarged  it.  It  had  been 
a  tribal  religion;  he  made  it  a  religion  of  the 
Western  world. 

Yet  surely  Jesus  himself  was  right  in  his 
judgment  of  what  he  came  to  do  (though  in 
after  centuries  orthodoxy  has  persistently  pro- 
claimed him  mistaken).  It  was  to  proclaim  a 
God  and  Father  long  ago  proclaimed,  to  strip 
off  the  veils  and  coverings  good  men  had  mis- 
takenly spread  over  his  face,  and  push  aside 
the  poor  daubed  pictures  they  had  painted  of 
him. 

It  was  not  to  destroy  the  law  or  the  pro- 
phets, but  to  fulfil ;  not  to  pull  down  the  Tem- 
ple, but  to  tell  its  meaning;  not  to  proclaim  a 
new  God,  but  a  God  long  ago  known  and 
worshipped,  —  the  Father,  not  of  some  favored 
Jews,  but  of  all.  His  vision  of  God  was  his 
own,  hut  it  was  not  a  complete  vision.  He 
says  so.  But  by  its  light  he  could  and  did 
claim  to  discriminate  between  what  was  of 
merely  temporary  and  what  of  permanent 
value  in  the  Jewish  religion  of  the  day.  (Of 
other  religions  he  knew  nothing.)  He  made 


42  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

God  nearer,  clearer,  to  simple  men.  He  gave 
them  a  more  inspiring  view  of  duty,  a  calmer 
courage,  a  purer  faith.  He  always  appealed  to 
the  divine  quality  in  men.  He  called  on  them 
to  see  the  light.  He  told  them  they  had  the 
power  to  follow  it.  He  had  no  quarrel  with 
authority.  The  priests  and  Pharisees  sit  in 
Moses'  seat.  Their  official  position  he  accepts, 
for  he  is  a  Jew.  But  their  perversion  of  the 
truth  they  profess  to  defend  he  denounces, 
for  the  one  aim  and  end  of  his  life  is  to  be 
true,  and  to  speak  the  truth ;  and  all  things 
that  hide  or  distort  the  truth  are  not  of  God, 
but  of  evil. 

Thus  Jesus  went  forth  upon  his  lonely  way. 
He  was  called  a  destroyer ;  he  was  in  truth  an 
evolutionist.  He  courted  and  met  a  destroyer's 
doom,  and  died  for  an  everlasting  principle.1 

1  After  delivering  these  lectures,  I  read  Harnack's  Con- 
stitution and  Law  of  the  Church,  which  has  just  been  given  us 
in  an  English  translation.  To  my  great  satisfaction,  I  find 
that  this  profound  scholar  fully  upholds  and  endorses  the 
view  I  have  ventured  to  present  of  Jesus'  relation  to  Judaism. 
On  page  4  of  the  Introduction,  Harnack  says  :  "The  Church 
is  younger  and  older  than  Jesus.  It  existed  in  a  certain  sense 
long  before  him.  It  was  founded  by  the  prophets,  in  the  first 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  43 

That  principle  was  the  principle  of  the 
seed.  Religious  truth  is  a  divine  seed  sown  in 
human  life.  There  is  nothing  new  or  startling 
in  that,  you  say;  every  one  admits  as  much. 
But  it  is  not  so.  So  far  as  I  know,  or  have  been 
able  to  learn,  Jesus  Christ  was  the  first  reli- 
gious teacher  so  to  define  truth  and  man's  rela- 
tion to  it.  His  disciples  certainly  at  first  did  not 
understand  the  significance  of  this  definition 
of  his.  To  his  opponents  and  detractors  the 
simile  itself  must  have  been  meaningless,  and 
his  application  of  it  aroused  their  fear  and 
wrath.  It  was  a  sweetly  reasonable  doctrine, 
but  it  was  also  an  epoch-making  doctrine. 
For  it  asserted  not  merely  that  truth  (as  we 
poor  men  down  here  get  to  see  it)  may  grow 
and  change  from  age  to  age,  but  that  by  vir- 
tue of  its  very  nature  and  environment,  it 
must  so  grow  and  change  or  speedily  die.  It 
was  a  definition  that  struck  hard  at  one  of  the 
most  cherished  beliefs,  not  of  the  Jewish  peo- 
ple alone,  but  of  the  whole  race.  To  accept  it 

place,  within  Israel,  but  even  at  that  time  it  pointed  beyond 
itself.  All  subsequent  developments  are  changes  of  form." 


44  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

meant  that  the  danger  to  true  religion  arises 
not  only  from  those  who  attack  its  claims 
from  without,  but  from  those,  its  would-be, 
often  honest-minded  defenders,  who  cham- 
pion its  cause  from  within. 

The  very  zeal  of  those  who  defend  religion 
might,  in  Jesus'  view,  prove  a  chief  cause  of 
danger ;  might  threaten  and  even  destroy  the 
very  precious  thing  they  were  fain  to  defend. 
In  the  very  interests  of  the  truth  itself,  many 
such  men,  in  all  religions,  in  all  parts  of  the 
world,  have  been  found,  who  manfully,  de- 
votedly protested  against  change  in  the  belief 
they  loved.  Those  advocating  change  were  to 
them,  by  that  very  advocacy,  clearly  revealed 
as  enemies  of  their  great  cause  of  truth  — 
profaners,  desecrators  of  the  shrines  of  the 
gods.  If  circumstances  place  power  in  such 
men's  hands,  without  question  or  quarter,  they 
will  unhesitatingly  use  such  power  to  crush  to 
the  earth  these  mistaken,  nay,  wicked  advo- 
cates of  what  to  them  is  nothing  less  than  a 
proclamation  of  religious  anarchy  and  blas- 
phemy. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  45 

No,  Jesus'  definition  is  not  so  simple  as  it 
sounds.  It  can  be  quoted  as  a  justification  for 
all  sorts  of  religious  movements,  sane  and  in- 
sane. It  can  be  made,  and  has  been  made  by 
the  incontinent  reformer,  to  cover  and  justify 
all  reformations,  even  those  of  the  iconoclast; 
to  justify  every  crude  and  ephemeral  heresy, 
from  early  gnosticism  to  the  modern  mon- 
strosities of  Mormonism  and  Christian  Science. 

I  think  I  am  safe  in  saying  that  as  a  whole 
the  early  Christian  teachers  did  not  under- 
stand the  vital  importance  of  this  aspect  of 
the  Master's  teaching.  They  fought  shy  of  it. 
Those  who  did  give  prominence  to  the  idea 
of  development  in  Christianity,  to  the  seed 
principle,  as  it  were,  though  among  them 
were  the  most  brilliant  minds  of  the  time, 
often  seem  to  have  got  out  of  touch  with  the 
general  life  of  the  Church  (perhaps  the  Church 
was  not  yet  ready  for  their  teaching).  Men 
who  are  out  of  touch  with  the  general  life  of 
their  time  are,  from  the  very  nature  of  the 
isolation  imposed  on  them,  inclined  to  over- 
emphasis, over-statement,   of   the   supremely 


46  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

good  thing  they  see,  and  so,  like  a  too  heavily 
laden  branch  in  a  not  too  fruitful  tree,  they 
fall  away,  by  reason  of  their  own  excess  of 
productiveness,  from  the  parent  stem.  Such 
is  the  sad  history  of  many  a  heresy,  of  many 
a  reform.  The  extremist  has  lost  touch  with 
the  main  trunk  of  the  tree,  which  was  neces- 
sary to  him,  and  the  semi-barren  tree  has  lost 
the  fruitful  bough,  which  was  a  grievous  loss 
to  it. 

The  forced  importance,  the  wide  signifi- 
cance of  this  simile  of  the  seed,  which  Jesus 
chooses  to  explain  the  nature  of  his  teaching 
and  the  quality  and  reproductive  power  of  his 
word,  are  only  realized  as  we  remember  that 
this  insistence  of  his  on  the  living,  growing, 
changing  property  of  truth  runs  through  all 
he  says,  influences  all  he  does.  He  dwells  on 
it  and  enforces  it.  He  is  attacked  by  his  ene- 
mies for  proclaiming  it,  and  finally  it  is  the 
doctrine  that  sends  him  to  his  cross. 

Let  me,  then,  briefly  touch  on  the  cause  of 
this  bitterness  of  opposition  to  a  principle  so 
reasonable. 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  47 

Conservatism  always  makes  a  good  fight 
for  its  own.  In  such  proportion  as  we  value 
what  we  hold,  we  rally  our  best  forces  to  de- 
fend it.  Conservatism  has  proved  itself  most 
stubborn  of  opponents  for  this  very  reason. 
It  is  the  high  value  we  attach  to  our  beliefs 
that  makes  us  rally  to  their  defence  against 
any  and  all  who  would  alter  them.  In  the 
hearts  of  multitudes  of  men  the  religious 
forms  that  have  surrounded  their  youth  are 
associated  with  what  in  retrospect  seems  to 
them  beautiful  and  best  worth  having.  It  is 
the  seed  sown  in  youth's  springtime,  ideas 
implanted  within  us  while  we  are  very  young, 
that  root  themselves  most  deeply.  They  take 
up  more  space  within  us  than  we  ourselves 
are  always  aware,  but  they  are  also  apt  to  lie 
more  dormant  than  those  ideas  we  call  the 
secular.  The  stress  and  strain  of  life  is  on  us. 
We  are  occupied  with  much  serving.  We  are 
forced  to  activity  in  many  ways,  but  this  is 
apt  not  to  be  so  true  in  our  religious  think- 
ing. 

No  great  religious  disputes  have  arisen  in 


48  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

our  time — at  least  none  that  have  called  men 
to  make  sacrifices  for  what  they  believe,  and 
so  (I  am  only  describing  the  case  of  the  or- 
dinary man)  the  deeply  planted  ideas  of  our 
earliest  days  remain  pretty  much  as  they  were. 
Besides,  we  are  forced  to  such  restlessness, 
such  perpetual  effort,  in  order  to  hold  our  own 
in  many  departments  of  our  life,  that  we  find 
it  pleasant  to  have  a  quiet  corner  in  it  some- 
where. And  if  that  corner  is  a  little  dusty  from 
disuse,  well,  the  very  dust  has  a  suggestion 
of  an  Old-World  perfume,  as  those  lavender- 
sprinkled  cupboards  of  our  mothers  had,  where 
the  most  precious  household  belongings  were 
laid  away  from  the  vulgar  eye.  "  Let  us  leave 
these  sacred  things  alone/ '  we  say.  "  Let  us 
come  to  the  religion  of  our  forefathers  to  rest. 
There  is  so  much  new  that  we  are  obliged  to 
study  and  use,  so  much  in  each  department 
of  life  that  must  be  changed,  let  us  forget  it 
here  as  long  as  we  may.  In  social,  political, 
mercantile,  or  artistic  life,  momentous  change 
is  everywhere  in  the  air.  Kadicalism  is  forced 
on  us.  Do  let  us  be  at  least  conservative  in 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  49 

our  religion.  What  is  good  enough  for  our 
parents  is  good  enough  for  us." 

I  am  persuaded  that  this  is  a  more  common 
attitude  than  is  generally  supposed,  and  of 
course  it  is  a  very  dead-and-alive  and  very 
unreal  attitude.  It  can  only  result  in  the  slow 
dying-out  in  a  man  of  those  deeply  important 
things  within  him  that  he  thinks  he  values 
most,  but  really  neglects,  till  at  last  of  him  it 
may  be  true  — 

Some  souls  are  serfs  among  the  free, 

While  others  nobly  thrive  ; 
They  stand  just  where  their  fathers  stood, 

Dead  even  while  they  live. 

But  not  to  digress  too  far ! 

From  modern  excuses  for  a  do-nothing  pol- 
icy in  religious  thinking,  let  me  hark  back  to 
the  consideration  of  those  circumstances  that 
made  Jesus  seem  a  religious  anarchist  to  the 
pious  conservatism  of  his  time,  and  brought 
down  on  him  the  hatred  of  the  rulers  of  his 
people.  Why  should  these  people  have  op- 
posed him  bitterly  as  they  did?  Jesus  himself 
was  ever  ready  to  recognize  constituted  author- 


50  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

ity.  "The  scribes  and  Pharisees  sit  in  Moses' 
seat.  Whatsoever  they  say  unto  you,  do  there- 
fore, but  be  ye  not  like  to  them."  This  was 
ever  his  attitude  to  the  officers  of  the  national 
religion  as  well  as  those  charged  with  more 
secular  rule.  Thus,  again,  to  the  man  who 
came  to  be  healed  he  says :  "  Go  show  thyself 
to  the  priests  and  offer  the  gift  that  Moses 
commanded  for  a  testimony  to  them  "  —  i.e. 
"  to  prove  to  them  that  I  am  a  law-abiding, 
God-honoring  Jew,  intent  on  obeying  the  law 
as  well  as  the  spirit  of  our  country's  religion." 

This  being  his  attitude,  how,  then,  account 
for  the  furious  hatred  that  was  satisfied  with 
nothing  less  for  him  than  the  doom  of  the 
shameful  cross?  Were  these  priests  and 
scribes,  these  politico-religious  men  that  were 
the  party  bosses  of  their  day  —  were  they  al- 
together evil  ?  Were  they  hardened  against 
all  pity,  and  hopelessly  bad?  By  no  means. 
But  they  were  committed,  both  by  their  incli- 
nations and  by  their  interests,  to  a  fixed  con- 
servatism. 

The  history  of  the  Jews'  fight  for  freedom 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  51 

since  the  return  from  captivity  is  a  great  story. 
The  men  who  waged  that  struggle  were  men 
of  high  purpose,  of  desperate  courage,  and  of 
faith  in  God.  And  doubtless  these  their  suc- 
cessors had  possibilities  of  heroism  within 
them.  They  were  of  the  same  lump  as  those 
who,  so  soon  after  the  days  of  Jesus,  called 
together  for  the  defence  of  all  they  held  most 
dear  the  banded  force  of  the  little  nation. 
And  then  behind  the  sacred  city's  wall,  and 
later  from  street  to  street  and  court  to  court, 
made  against  the  irresistible  power  and  dis- 
cipline of  Rome  one  of  the  most  hopelessly 
heroic  defences  recorded  in  history. 

These  men  who  opposed  Jesus  then  were 
far  from  being  utterly  bad  men.  Yet  they 
mistook  their  way.  They  ruined  (as  Jesus 
foretold  they  would)  their  country,  and  they 
did  all  that  evil  men  might  do  to  quench  the 
light  of  the  world.  It  is  a  heavy  indictment 
that  history  has  lodged  against  them,  and  yet 
they  only  did  what  others  have  done  again 
and  again.  They  were  at  least  as  much  the 
victims  of  a  mistaken  policy  as  they  were  the 


52  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

perpetrators  of  a  crime,  and  the  order  we  live 
under  punishes  us  as  promptly  for  one  as  for 
the  other. 

As  I  said,  then,  before,  the  very  value  the 
Jews  and  their  leaders  attached  to  the  relig- 
ion, of  which  they  rightly  believed  themselves 
to  be  the  divinely  appointed  guardians,  made 
them  fanatically  opposed  to  any  changes  in  it 
—  whether  forced  on  them  by  foreign  powers 
from  without,  or  promulgated  by  unauthorized 
and  irresponsible  teachers,  as  they  believed 
them  to  be,  from  within. 

Then  their  cause  of  quarrel  with  the  Lord 
was  clear  —  unmistakably  clear.  They  would 
willingly  die  to  defend  what  they  thought 
was  the  truth,  but  what  was  actually  only  the 
corpse  whence  truth,  the  life,  had  fled.  They 
were  the  "  stand-patters "  of  their  time. 
Jesus  was  the  Radical  of  his.  Jesus  stood  for 
the  growth-principle,  believed  in  the  certainty 
and  necessity  of  development  and  change  in 
man's  view  of  God  and  of  his  truth.  These 
others  held  fast  by  the  sacred  deposit  the 
nation  had  received.    They  regarded  it  as  a 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  53 

treasure  no  hands  but  their  own  might  touch 
—  an  Ark  of  the  Covenant,  so  many  inches 
wide,  so  many,  long,  containing  so  many  sa- 
cred words  and  letters  of  directly  revealed 
truth  ;  nay,  every  letter  traced,  as  their  holy 
tradition  had  it,  by  the  ringer  of  God.  Theirs 
was  the  mistake,  still  made  by  good  but  mis- 
guided men  to-day,  that  "the  Faith  once  de- 
livered to  the  saints  "  was  only  to  be  expressed 
in  the  dogmas  they  propounded  and  defended. 

Needless  to  say,  in  the  formulation  of  their 
theory,  these  religious  conservators  ignored 
both  present  facts  and  past  history ;  ignored 
the  fact,  which  all  scholars  at  that  time  knew 
well,  that  age  by  age  round  that  law  had 
grown  up  a  vast  mass  of  commentary  and  subtle 
explanation  that  had  often,  at  least  in  the 
popular  mind,  become  confused  with  the  di- 
vine law  itself.  Jesus  had  accurately  summed 
up  the  whole  religious  situation  when  he  said, 
"  Ye  have  made  the  law  of  God  of  none  effect 
through  your  tradition." 

I  dwell  on  this  fatal  conservatism  of  the  op- 
ponents of  our  Lord,  not  chiefly  because  it 


54  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

explains  the  source  of  the  orthodox  hatred  he 
drew  down  on  himself,  but  particularly  be- 
cause it  furnishes  an  admirable  illustration  of 
a  spirit  that  always  has  been  and  ever  will  be 
active  in  the  mistaken  defence  of  what  it 
deems  to  be  the  truth  —  u  a  spirit  of  irrelig- 
ious solicitude  for  God"  I  wTould  call  it. 
Some  old  saint  somewhere  gave  it  that  name. 
It  seems  to  fit  the  case. 

This  spirit  of  irreligious  solicitude  for  God 
is  not  the  spirit  of  one  age  only,  but  of  all 
ages.  It  has  been  fatally  active  not  in  the  his- 
tory of  Christianity  alone.  Its  presence  is 
evident  in  the  history  of  all  the  great  religions. 
Earlier  and  purer  Mohammedanism  has  suf- 
fered, as  Judaism  suffered,  at  the  hands  of  its 
self-constituted  guardians  and  exponents.  A 
Mohammedan  reformer  might  also  truly  say, 
"  Ye  have  made  God's  law  of  none  effect 
through  your  tradition." 

Looking  back  through  the  dim  spectacles 
of  history  on  the  struggle  round  the  person 
and  teaching  of  Jesus,  it  seems  a  one-sided 
affair.  All  goodness  and  beauty  on  one  side; 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  55 

all  that  is  vile  and  vicious  on  the  other.  Ig- 
norant, unhistoric  ages  have  poured  their  vi- 
tuperation on  the  men  who  prepared  the  way 
for  the  Cross,  and  then  firmly  forced  its  vic- 
tim to  his  inevitable  doom.  But  this  was  not 
Jesus'  own  view.  He  was  full  of  mercy  and 
charity  for  the  generation  that  rejected  and 
martyred  him.  Of  priest,  Pharisee,  scribe,  and 
multitude  it  was  alike  true,  "  They  knew  not 
what  they  did " ;  and  yet  their  own  history 
might  have  enlightened  them.  Let  us  look 
backward  for  a  moment. 

The  sacred  religion  of  the  Jews  had  already 
survived  more  than  one  catastrophe,  had  come 
through  more  than  one  tempest,  had  proved 
its  possession  of  a  vital  power  that  no  con- 
temporary religion  seems  to  have  possessed. 
In  my  first  lecture  I  tried  to  trace  the  reason- 
ableness and  necessity  of  the  organic  form 
which  that  religion  took.  The  Temple,  the 
one  holy  place,  its  priestly  order,  its  rich  rit- 
ual, served  as  the  necessary  centre  of  the  na- 
tion's life,  a  nation,  the  special  office  of  which 
was  to  preserve  for  our  race  a  pure  monothe- 


56  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

ism.  Other  nations  might  gather  round  their 
kings  and  the  temples  of  many  gods.  The 
Jews  stood  fast  round  the  temple  of  one  God, 
which  took  precedence  of  the  throne  of  any 
Jewish  king. 

In  no  land,  in  no  religion,  so  far  as  I  know, 
was  there  any  counterpart  to  that  sacredly 
unique  building  at  Jerusalem.  The  vitality 
of  this  religion  was  to  be  subjected  to  a  ter- 
rible test.  There  befell  it  a  catastrophe  that 
swept  people  and  temple  away.  Conquest,  fol- 
lowed by  national  transplantation,  was  a  com- 
mon fate  enough  in  those  cruel  days  of  old. 
To  consolidate  their  strength,  the  greater 
peoples  laid  ruthless  hands  upon  the  less,  who 
speedily  were  henceforth  lost  to  history,  they 
and  their  traditions  disappearing  forever.  The 
rude  Assyrian  captain,  standing  before  Jeru- 
salem's wall,  spake  no  more  than  the  truth 
when  he  said,  "  Hath  any  of  the  gods  of  the 
nations  delivered  at  all  his  land  out  of  the  hand 
of  the  King  of  Assyria  ?  Where  are  the  gods 
of  Hamath  and  of  Arpad  ?  Where  are  the  gods 
of  Sepharvaim,  Hena,  and  Ivah  ?  Have  they 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  57 

delivered  Samaria  out  of  my  hand?  Who  are 
they,  among  all  the  gods  of  the  countries, 
that  have  delivered  their  country  out  of  my 
hand,  that  the  Lord  should  deliver  Jerusalem 
out  of  my  hand?  " 

Why,  indeed,  should  Judah's  case  prove  dif- 
ferent from  these  ?  So  it  seemed,  when  finally 
the  conquering  horde  swept  over  the  land  and 
the  city.  The  sacred  places  are  desecrated, 
every  precious  and  holy  thing  is  carried  away. 
Quenched  is  the  only  light  of  Israel's  God, 
and  faithful  and  faithless  have  perished  to- 
gether. 

Then  a  wonderful  thing  —  a  thing  without 
a  parallel  in  all  history  —  comes  to  pass. 
Bereft  of  all  religious  opportunity,  the  great 
soul  of  a  little  people  arises,  and  takes  hold  on 
the  skirts  of  God.  Without  a  temple  or  an 
altar,  without  a  priestly  order  or  any  rites  of 
sacrifice,  in  a  remote  and  heathen  land,  the 
flame  of  a  true  worship  of  a  true  God  flickers 
up  in  the  darkness.  In  the  hearts  of  brave  men 
and  women,  in  the  voices  of  faithful  preachers 
and  poets,  it  was  heard.  The  nation  had  truly 


58  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

gone  down  into  its  hell,  and  there  it  found  its 
God  anew. 

And  so  a  national  miracle  was  wrought,  and 
these  Jewish  tribes  —  what  was  left  of  them, 
unimportant  in  their  hour  of  prosperity  even, 
diminished  to  a  mere  handful  in  their  hour  of 
loss  —  achieved  what  none  of  the  great  peo- 
ples of  the  earth  ever  achieved  —  a  national 
resurrection. 

Needless  to  say,  these  returning  survivors 
of  a  seventy  years'  captivity  were  no  common 
men,  were  moved  by  no  commonplace  impulse. 
They  came  back  wiser  and  more  sober  men. 
Yes,  more  than  that.  They  came  back  with  a 
larger  faith,  with  a  hope  that  till  then  had 
not  (so  far  as  we  can  learn  from  their  pre- 
captivity  writings)  been  any  part  of  their  re- 
ligion —  the  hope  of  personal  immortality 
after  death.  Their  bitter  experience  had  tended 
to  teach  them  that  God  cared,  not  for  the  na- 
tion only  as  the  guardian  of  his  truth,  but  for 
the  individual  too.  They  had  learned  to  love 
their  land,  their  temple,  their  law,  their  priestly 
order,  and  greatly  yet  they  were  to  fight  and 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  59 

suffer  for  these  things.  But  the  God  who  had 
led  them  back  cared  for  something  more  even 
than  these.  He  cared  for  man.  Cut  off  from 
all  they  had  been  taught  to  hold  sacred,  all  that 
their  divinely  given  law  had  insistently  pro- 
claimed necessary,  denied  priest,  sacrifice, 
temple,  altar,  God  had  not  denied  himself  to 
them.  He  had  not  turned  away  his  face  from 
them  in  their  exile.  He  had  hearkened  to  the 
voice  of  their  prayer.  Is  it  too  much  to  say 
that,  while  they  were  exiles  worshipping  with- 
out a  temple,  the  seed  of  that  sublime  truth 
which  in  after  years  was  to  be  voiced  by  Jesus 
the  Jew  found  lodgment  in  the  Jewish  na- 
tion's heart,  and  dimly  the  best  of  them  fore- 
saw a  day  when  the  place  or  mode  of  man's 
worship  should  matter  little,  and  the  spirit  of 
that  worship  matter  all  ?  when  "  neither  in 
Gerzim,  nor  yet  at  Jerusalem  should  men  wor- 
ship the  Father,  for  he  is  a  spirit  and  seeketh 
true  worshippers  to  worship  him  in  spirit  and 
in  truth"? 

Had,  then,  the  glorious  temple  planned  by 
David,  the  poet  king,  andbuilded  by  Solomon, 


60  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

quite  failed  of  its  purpose  ?  Surely  not.  It  bad, 
as  it  were,  anchored  the  Jewish  people  during 
dark,  stormy  times.  It  had  enabled  the  Jew  to 
resist  the  disintegrating  forces  of  a  period  dur- 
ing which  the  nations  surrounding  them  seem 
one  after  another  to  have  disappeared.  It  had 
accomplished  more.  It  had  helped  to  foster  in 
the  very  heart  of  the  Jew  an  understanding  of 
and  a  love  for  monotheism,  that  no  national 
calamity,  not  even  a  national  exile  among  alien 
religionists,  could  overcome  or  destroy. 

The  exile,  then,  had  its  uses.  Its  teachings 
were  never,  we  may  believe,  quite  lost.  But  by 
the  time  Jesus  came  they  had  in  their  turn  been 
overlaid  and  long  forgotten.  The  inevitable 
(shall  we  call  it  ?)  conservatism  of  human  na- 
ture had  again  asserted  itself.  Very  soon  it  had 
built  up  round  the  growing  seed  of  the  truth 
new  protecting  walls  and  shields.  The  divine 
deposit  of  seed  that  the  heathen  captivity 
could  not  kill  was  so  precious  it  must  be  care- 
fully guarded  in  a  Pot.  Then  the  pot  itself 
becomes  precious,  and  naturally  so,  because 
it  protects  the  seed.  Presently  the  seed  grows 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  Gl 

and  sprouts  above  the  pot,  for  it  has  life,  it  is 
seed,  gets,  in  short,  too  big  for  the  pot.  And 
what  are  you  going  to  do  about  it  ? 

Ah,  this  quality  of  growth  is  a  troublesome 
and  painful  thing  —  pain  and  striving,  change 
and  decay  it  means,  but  there  is  no  real  joy  or 
power  in  living  without  it.  We  men  are  ever 
making  choice  between  the  growing  seed  and 
the  containing  pot,  and  as  we  choose  wisely  or 
ill,  we  succeed  or  we  fail  in  life's  great  task, 
to  advance  or  oppose  the  Kingdom  of  God 
and  of  truth. 

In  the  realm  of  what  is  called  the  practical, 
the  penalties  for  refusal  to  acknowledge  or 
obey  the  law  of  change  are  so  severe,  are  so 
immediately  operative,  that  stupidity  itself  can- 
not ignore  or  evade  them.  A  man  will  insist 
on  doing  business  on  the  old  stand  where  his 
father  did  it  before  him.  His  father  succeeded 
there — he  cannot.  Business  has  drifted  away 
from  that  quarter.  He  must  follow  the  drift 
or  lose  his  living.  Harsh  experience  ruthlessly 
forces  change  on  the  most  conservative  busi- 
ness or  professional  man.   If  he  put  the  pot's 


62  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

life  before  the  seed's  life,  he  is  sooner  or  later 
a  failure.  The  man  who  will  not  move  on 
is  lost.  And  knowing  this,  we  send  our  boys 
to  the  best  schools,  colleges,  universities,  and 
insist  that  those  who  teach  them,  or  supervise 
their  studies  there,  should  be  men  well  ac- 
quainted with  the  last  discoveries  of  science  or 
latest  conclusions  of  history.  Let  me  sin  against 
the  law  of  progress  in  my  business,  in  my  daily 
contact  with  my  fellows,  and  I  am  so  immedi- 
ately punished  that  I  am  not  likely  quickly  to 
sin  again.  In  other  departments  of  my  life, 
though  of  course  the  same  law  holds  good,  I 
may  not  be  so  quick  to  see  or  prove  its  opera- 
tion. If  my  child  is  dangerously  sick  and  I 
choose  a  doctor,  I  will  insist  that  he  is  a  man 
whose  conservatism  has  not  prevented  his  giv- 
ing thorough  study  to  the  new  and  wonderful 
medical  discoveries  of  our  day.  I  will  not  en- 
dure the  idea  that,  because  of  any  fad  of  his, 
my  child  should  be  denied  the  use  of  the  serum 
for  diphtheria,  for  instance,  or  Pasteur's  treat- 
ment for  rabies.  But  instill  other  departments 
of  life,  where  reality  is  not  so  ruthlessly  forced 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  63 

on  me,  and  where  I  do  not  so  quickly  pay  for 
my  folly,  it  is  just  as  likely  as  not  that  I  will 
play  the  fool.  I  who  insist  that  the  pot  shall  not 
be  preferred  to  the  seed  may  be  found  putting 
up,  just  as  the  Jews  did,  a  very  pretty  defence 
pro  pot,  contra  seed.  I  may  be  ready  to  notice 
and  condemn  this  fatally  mistaken  tendency  in 
other  men,  or  in  other  ages  than  my  own,  and 
yet  range  myself  with  those  who  are  playing 
the  very  same  part,  advocating  the  same  prin- 
ciple, in  religious,  sociological,  or  ethical  mat- 
ters to-day. 

It  is  an  easy  matter  to  condemn  those  brave 
and  obstinate  Jews  of  long  ago,  but  few  trou- 
ble themselves  to  think  out  the  reasons  they 
had  for  a  choice  that  to  after  ages  appeared 
the  wickedest,  the  most  unreasonable  that  men 
could  have  made.  But  if  it  is  ever  right  to 
prefer  the  life  of  the  pot  to  the  life  of  the 
seed  it  enshields,  their  choice  was  not  so  un- 
reasonable. 

Every  reform  —  what  is  it  but  the  seed 
power  triumphing  over  the  pot  power?  And 
no  sooner  are  the  shards  of  the  once  precious 


64  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

pot  scattered  abroad  than  we  set  to  work  to 
mould  and  bake  a  new  pot  —  larger,  more  lib- 
eral in  its  measure  —  to  contain  the  expanded 
seed. 

"Now,  surely/'  we  say  to  ourselves,  "we 
have  something  so  wisely  liberal,  so  compre- 
hensive, so  purely  true,  all  men  can  accept  it. 
The  holy  seed  has  become,  indeed,  a  tree.  We 
admit  as  much  —  nay,  we  glory  in  it.  But  see 
what  we  have  done.  Here  is  a  great  hedge  we 
have  planted  to  protect  our  tree  of  truth. 
Here  is  a  comprehensive  creed  we  have  evolved, 
to  explain  its  origin,  its  nature,  and  the  laws 
of  its  growth.  The  destructive  changes  of  the 
past  were  necessary.  The  cruel  breakings  of 
the  pots  of  other  ages  had  to  be.  But  now  at 
last,  see  this  new  scheme,  this  splendid,  all- 
containing  pot  of  ours.  These  views  of  God, 
these  definitions  of  his  truth,  are  so  catholic, 
so  comprehensive,  they  will  surely  stand.  May 
we  not  now  at  last  hope  to  enjoy  unity  and 
peace  ?  All  reasonable  men  cannot  hesitate  to 
accept  them.  Here  at  last  is  a  sound  credal 
platform,  wide  enough  for  all  good  men  to 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  65 

stand  together  on,  firmly  built  and  strong 
enough  to  support  us  all." 

So,  in  all  ages,  often  the  wisest  and  brav- 
est and  best  have  argued  —  so  they  still  ar- 
gue to-day;  and  yet  their  conclusions  have 
proved  fallacious,  their  definitions  failed  to 
define,  their  comprehensions  failed  to  compre- 
hend. Like  old  pots,  cracked  and  useless,  they 
were  fated  to  be  discarded  by  those  who  came 
after  them,  men  who  proved  themselves  as 
truly  truth-seekers  in  their  newer  day  and 
generation  as  these  first  had  been  valued  for 
truth  in  the  times  before.  For,  ah!  what  is 
history?  What  but  the  story  of  the  thoughts 
of  men  that  widen  with  the  process  of  the 
suns? 

The  reformer  often  makes  the  same  mistake 
as  the  tyrant.  The  tyrant  consolidates  his 
power  till  the  reformer  casts  him  down.  The 
reformer  sees  an  evil  thing  and  valiantly 
strives  to  destroy  it.  On  its  ruin  he  builds  the 
house  of  his  fortune,  and  that  house  stands 
till  the  next  age  finds  something  false  or  dan- 
gerous or  inadequate  in  it,  and  lo !   a  new 


66  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

reformer  arises  and  casts  it  down.  For  sadly 
true  it  is  that  the  reforms  of  one  age  may  be- 
come the  tyrannies  of  the  next.  The  much- 
lauded  Puritan  struck  bravely  at  the  tyranny 
of  kings.  It  was  a  noble  and  a  timely  stroke. 
But  scarcely  had  the  Stuart's  head  fallen 
before  the  Puritan  yoke  lay  heavy  on  free- 
dom's neck  in  England.  The  Puritan,  like  all 
Protestants,  knew  how  bravely  to  protest 
against  error.  He  thought  he  had  the  truth 
and  all  the  truth,  and  was  ready  and  willing 
to  give  it  to  men,  but  to  give  men  liberty  as 
well  as  the  truth  was  quite  another  matter.  It 
was  full  time  that  the  pot  of  sacred  monarchy 
was  broken  —  and  very  thoroughly  broken  it 
was;  but  in  a  few  years  the  iron  pot  of  Puri- 
tanism that  shattered  it  had  itself,  in  the  in- 
terests of  freedom,  truth,  and  mankind,  to  be 
shattered,  too. 

Let  me  add  one  other  historic  illustration 
of  the  point  I  urge.  On  our  Western  conti- 
nent, at  about  the  same  time  that  privilege 
and  Puritanism  were  settling  their  momentous 
dispute  in  England,  an  extraordinary  enter- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  G7 

prise  was  attempted  by  extraordinary  men. 
"  These,"  as  our  great  historian  Parkman  elo- 
quently says,  "  were  no  stern  exiles  seeking 
on  barbarous  shores  an  asylum  for  a  perse- 
cuted faith.  Rank,  wealth,  power,  and  royalty 
itself  smiled  on  their  enterprise  and  bade 
them  Godspeed.  Yet,  withal,  a  fervor  more 
intense,  a  self-abnegation  more  complete,  a 
self-devotion  more  constant  and  enduring, 
will  scarcely  find  its  record  on  the  page  of 
human  history."  Unlike  as  men  could  be  to 
the  stern  and  outlawed  band  that  landed  at 
Plymouth  Rock,  undoubtedly  they  were;  yet 
was  their  courage  as  high,  their  aims  not  less 
noble.  They  would  win  the  vast  and  unknown 
wilderness  of  North  America,  first  to  God,  and 
then  to  France.  To  do  so,  they  made  light  of 
danger  and  cheerfully  went  forth  into  a  wild- 
erness where  often  death  by  famine  or  by 
torture  awaited  them.  Such  was  Jesuitry  at 
its  best — in  1637.  Before  the  end  of  that 
seventeenth  century,  the  Canadian  Jesuit  had 
become  at  least  as  much  a  politician  as  a  mis- 
sionary, and  in  the  new  world,  as  in  the  old, 


68  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

he  was  scheming  and  plotting  to  fasten  the 
yoke  of  civil  and  religious  bondage  on  men 
—  was  pursuing  the  path  that,  spite  of  splen- 
did self-sacrifice,  has  made  the  very  name  of 
Jesuit  hated  wherever  progress  and  liberty  are 
known. 

Those  men  heard  the  call  of  God  and  they 
heeded  it,  and  the  world  still  marvels  at  the 
sublime  courage  of  their  martyrdom.  But 
they  allowed  themselves  to  be  seduced  from 
the  high  and  narrow  way.  Irreligious  solici- 
tude for  God  betrayed  them,  as  so  often  it 
has  betrayed  the  greatest  soldiers  of  the  cause. 
They  came  to  value  the  dead  pot  more  than 
the  living  seed;  and  thus  inevitably  it  came 
about  that  the  cause  of  the  light  against  the 
darkness  had  to  be  entrusted  to  more  progress- 
ive, more  enlightened,  but  perhaps  not  bet- 
ter men  than  they. 

"  A  sower  went  forth  to  sow."  "  The  King- 
dom of  Heaven  is  seed."  "I  have  many  things 
to  say  unto  you,  but  ye  cannot  bear  them 
now.  When  the  Spirit  of  Truth  is  come,  He 
will  guide  you  into  all  truth."  "  For  this  cause 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  69 

was  I  born,  for  this  cause  came  I  into  the 
world,  that  I  should  bear  witness  to  the  truth. 
Every  one  that  is  of  the  truth  heareth  my 
voice."  So  spake  the  Son  of  man.  Clear  as  is 
his  vision  of  the  truth  men  need,  he  claims 
for  that  vision  no  finality.  There  are  things 
he  does  not  know.  There  are  questions  he  will 
not  attempt  to  answer.  He  has  no  creed  to 
offer  men.  He  is  a  sower  sent  from  God  to 
sow  seed  —  seed  that  he  is  confident  will  grow 
to  a  vast  harvest,  will  spread  as  yeast  spreads 
in  the  flour. 

My  friends,  these  are  Christian  common- 
places that  need  to  be  repeated  to-day.  They 
have  been  too  often  forgotten  and  ignored. 
This  Jesus  has  no  sacred  vessel  ready  to  con- 
tain and  protect  the  precious  seed  of  the  truth 
that  he  sees  and  sows.  Its  life  and  future  de- 
pend on  its  own  divine  vitality  and  the  fltted- 
ness  of  the  soil  into  which  it  falls.  He  is  no 
ecclesiastic.  The  vision  of  the  truth  that  he 
saw,  the  things  he  said  about  men  and  about 
God,  were  living  seeds,  indeed.  They  fell,  they 
rooted  themselves,  they  grew  to  beauty  and 


70  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

to  harvest.  They  affected  men  profoundly. 
They  came  to  be  held  as  God's  most  precious 
gift  to  man,  his  child';  and  since  this  was 
so,  human  love  and  faith  could  do  no  less 
than  surround  its  treasure  with  the  fairest 
treasury  wealth  could  supply,  or  art  plan, 
and  so  yet  once  again,  as  history  repeats 
itself,  were  laid  the  foundations  of  the  mighty 
ecclesiastical  structures  of  the  past:  some  of 
them  great  and  old,  venerable  and  beautiful 
beyond  words  to  the  artist's  eye,  and  some 
very  modern  and  absurd ;  Roman  and  Grecian, 
Anglican  and  Presbyterian,  and  "isms"  in- 
numerable. Pots,  pots,  and  again  pots.  The  old 
story  of  the  pot.  The  best  poor  human  love, 
faith,  and  wit  could  do,  with  the  things  it  had 
at  hand,  to  deck  and  preserve  the  holy  seed 
it  would  give,  and  often  did  give,  its  very 
life  for  ;  yet  one  and  all  of  them,  the  ancient 
and  beautiful,  or  modern  and  grotesque, 
doomed  in  the  very  nature  of  things  to  disuse 
and  decay. 

For  each  age,  God-hungry,  turns  from  the 
flesh-pots  of  its  Egypt  to  the  best  idea  of  God 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  71 

it  can  win,  and  following  that  idea,  so  is  led 
through  its  own  wilderness,  follows  its  own 
pillar  of  cloud  by  day  and  pillar  of  fire  by 
night,  wrestles  with  its  plagues,  beats  back  its 
enemies,  and  spite  of  all  its  losses,  struggles, 
struggles  onward,  towards  the  distant  Canaan 
where  it  would  be.  Each  age  leaves  to  the 
future  the  story  of  its  struggle,  the  precious 
symbols  of  its  victories,  the  battle  standards 
round  which  its  hopes  and  beliefs  rallied,  and 
made  good  their  stand. 

But  old  banners  that  were  waved  in  the 
victories  of  long  ago  may  lead  us  to  defeat 
to-day.  The  brazen  serpent  that  was  the  sym- 
bol and  guarantee  of  divine  deliverance  to 
one  generation  may  become  the  accursed  idol 
of  the  next.  It  is  the  duty  of  Moses  to  hold 
it  aloft.  No  less  it  is  the  duty  of  Joshua  to 
grind  it  to  powder.  For,  ah  !  the  ideals  of  one 
generation  do  often  become  the  idols  of  the 
next — poor  plaster  casts  of  God,  fit  only  to 
be  broken  and  thrown  away. 

Do  not  let  me  be  misunderstood.  I  am  not 
denying  the  need,  in  their  proper  place,  of 


72  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

all  those  religions  constructions  that  grew, 
and  grow  of  necessity,  round  any  and  all 
precious  truth-winnings  of  mankind,  useful 
and  necessary  for  a  time  in  giving  expression 
to  man's  most  vital  part,  his  religious  instinct; 
needful  as  are  all  bodies  to  house  temporarily 
all  souls,  but  not  to  be  regarded  by  any  means 
as  complete  and  final  expressions  of  the  soul 
of  truth  they  temporarily  protect,  or  of  the 
divine  life  they  partially  express  and  explain. 
No;  I  would  but  emphasize  again  the  fact 
that,  while  creeds,  dogmas,  sacred  writings, 
religious  ordinances,  etc.,  may  be  locally  and 
temporarily  of  great  importance,  they  are  at 
best  but  pots,  whose  sole  use  is  to  protect  the 
seed  of  life;  blundering,  imperfect  attempts 
in  terms  of  the  finite  to  explain  the  Infinite. 
They  are  not,  however  venerable,  of  the  na- 
ture of  the  seed  itself.  Truth  needs  them,  and 
outgrows  them;  seeking  ever  newer  forms, 
which  again  in  their  turn  must  inevitably  be 
outgrown. 

AVe  see  through  a  glass  darkly;  we  see  in 
no   other  way.  We  know  in   part,  and  the 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  73 

wisest  and  best,  not  even  the  Master  himself, 
have  ever  known  or  seen  in  any  other  way. 
For  if  there  is  a  God  at  all,  he  certainly  is  In- 
finite, and  we,  though  we  be  his  real  children, 
sparks  cast  forth  by  the  sun  of  his  being, 
know  ourselves  sadly  to  be  finite  and  limited, 
indeed. 

In  Jesus  I  believe  the  Infinite  drew  as  near 
to  man  as  Infinity  might  draw  to  finitude.  I 
mean  by  that  that  our  race  may  never  hope 
to  see  any  one  more  full  of  God,  more  truly 
divine,  than  was  the  man,  Christ  Jesus.  And 
if  this  be  true,  then  in  Jesus'  life  and  teach- 
ing and  character,  seen  and  studied  rationally, 
must  be  found  all  that  manhood  in  its  best 
flower  can  in  its  present  stage  of  being  know 
or  reveal  of  God. 

I  think  a  study  of  Jesus  leads  to  such  a 
conclusion.  This  undoubtedly  was  Jesus'  own 
view  of  his  person  and  mission.  He  believed 
that  the  age-long  conviction,  so  firmly  em- 
bedded in  his  race,  was  divinely  implanted ; 
that  in  the  changing  phases  of  its  existence 
his  nation  had  guarded,  held  in  trust  for  man- 


74  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

kind,  a  revelation  of  the  one  true  God  and 
Father  of  all;  that  tribal  life  and  tabernacle 
worship,  and  then  temple  and  statelier  ritual, 
all .  expressed  God,  all  were  aids — crutches, 
as  it  were,  to  help  lame  humanity  to  God; 
that  Jewish  poets  and  prophets  spake  as  they 
were  moved  by  the  same  everlasting  Holy 
Spirit,  that  more  fully,  more  humanly,  more 
intimately,  spake  in  him;  and  that  when  his 
work  should  have  been  accomplished,  that 
same  eternal  voice  would  surely  continue  to 
guide  into  a  clearer  daylight  the  steps  of  men 
whose  wills  were  right  with  God. 

In  this  sense,  then,  Jesus  himself  was  care- 
ful not  to  claim  finality  for  his  teaching. 
There  he  differed  from  other  great  religious 
reformers.  He  was  a  sower  of  seed.  He  gave 
men  a  living  principle,  not  a  golden  hrick. 
Nay,  he  himself  was  but  a  seed  cast  into  the 
ground,  and  his  dying  was,  in  his  view,  neces- 
sary, "for  unless  seed  fall  into  the  ground  and 
die,  it  remaineth  alone." 

I  venture  to  think  that  this  teaching  of 
the  Son  of  man  has  never  received,  at  the 


THE   RELIGION  OF  JESUS  75 

churches'  hands,  the  recognition  its  profound 
importance  deserves.  It  is  the  quality  of  ex- 
pansiveness  in  it,  the  capacity  to  change,  to 
grow  with  man's  growing  life,  which  consti- 
tutes its  profound  reasonableness. 

Other  religions  have  done  vast  good  for  a 
time.  But  they  have  been  locally  adapted,  and 
so,  having  met  the  needs  of  a  certain  race  or 
certain  epoch  only,  with  that  race  or  epoch 
they  were  doomed  to  decay.  But  this  Gospel 
of  the  Son  of  man,  this  Gospel  of  the  seed, 
is  an  expanding  gospel,  sure  to  grow  and  ad- 
vance with  the  life  of  the  race  which  it  both 
comforts  and  explains  —  sure  in  time  to  be- 
come actually  what  it  claims  to  be,  the  religion 
of  the  wide  world. 


76  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 


III 
JESUS'  DOCTRINE  OF  THE  SEED  (continued) 

Jesus  said,  "  So  is  the  Kingdom  of  God,  as  if  a  man  should 
cast  seed  into  the  ground ;  .  .  .  and  the  seed  should  spring  and 
grow  up,  he  knoweth  not  how.  For  the  earth  bringeth  forth 
fruit  of  herself."  —  Mark  iv,  26-28. 

One  of  the  commonest  and  most  misleading 
mistakes  made  by  that  multitude  of  good 
Christian  people,  who  have  had  no  time  or  in- 
clination seriously  to  study  the  religion  they 
heartily  accept,  is  that  of  supposing  that  the 
Christianity  they,  without  much  thought,  have 
accepted,  has  come  to  them  practically  un- 
changed from  the  earliest  days,  —  that  the 
doctrines  they  hold  were  always  held  by  be- 
lievers—  were  held  as  they  hold  them  to-day, 
—  that  in  defending  these,  in  protesting  against 
any  change  in  them,  they  are  standing  for 
the  truth ;  and  that  those  who  advocate  re- 
statement are  bent  on  destroying  the  fabric 
of  the  faith.  Of  course  this  is  far  from  the 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  77 

truth.  Practically  universal  scholarship  admits 
to-day  that  orthodox  Christianity  has  under- 
gone quite  extraordinary  transformations.  I 
have  pointed  out  this  fact  to  you  before.  I 
must  still  at  some  length  insist  on  it,  for 
to  forget  it,  to  deny  it,  must  lead  to  endless 
confusion,  misunderstanding,  and  error. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  those  who  advocate 
change  are  often  most  truly  conservative. 
They  are  seeking  only  to  draw  the  faith  and 
hope  of  their  fellows  back  to  those  higher 
standards,  the  truer  concepts  of  an  earlier  day 
—  are  actually  imitating  Jesus  himself.  For 
what  did  Jesus  do?  He  set  himself  to  rescue 
from  its  mistaken  guardians  and  teachers 
the  truth  his  Heavenly  Father  had  given  to 
men;  that  revelation  had  been  covered  out 
of  sight,  made  of  none  effect  through  their 
added  traditions,  perverted  by  their  sophistry, 
denied  and  falsified  by  their  custom,  till  in 
their  keeping  the  house  of  God  had  indeed 
become  a  den  of  thieves. 

After  the  Master's  death  —  when  Pentecost's 
power  was   on    them  —  the   twelve   disciples 


78  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

and  their  company  went  everywhere  preaching 
his  word.  Signs  and  wonders  were  wrought 
by  them  in  his  name.  They  literally  accom- 
plished in  a  day  what  in  all  his  ministry  he 
had  failed  to  accomplish.  Thousands  be- 
lieved and  went  forth  to  life's  tasks,  rejoicing 
in  a  new  hope,  where  before  a  little  company 
had  but  doubtingly  followed. 

But  this  first  band  of  saved  and  inspired 
men  had  their  own  work  to  do.  It  was  to 
preach.  They  were  not  historians.  The  needs 
of  the  far  future  were  not  visible  to  them. 
The  immediate  present  was  their  care.  They 
spoke,  they  toiled,  but  they  did  not  write. 
They  were  not  fitted  for  writing. 

There  were  others  —  their  followers  —  who 
had  learned  at  second-hand  from  them  about 
Jesus.  These  naturally  began  to  make  some 
record  of  the  gospel  story,  and  on  their  every 
page  the  divine  glow  of  a  vital  inspiration 
forever  remains.  There  were  still  others,  such 
as  the  unknown  authors  of  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews,  or  of  the  Apocalypse,  whose  evident 
inspiration  is  of  almost  as  high  an  order  as 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  79 

that  of  their  teachers  themselves.  Who  can 
deny  the  height  and  glory  of  the  spiritual 
standard  they  attain?  We  know  not  their 
names,  yet  the  very  fact  that  such  writings 
and  several  others  hy  unknown  hands  should 
have  survived  to  our  time,  and  should  have 
won  a  deserved  place  in  the  canon,  proves 
conclusively  how  wonderful  was  the  spiritual 
life  and  enthusiasm  Jesus  breathed  into  the 
hearts  of  those  men  who  companioned  with 
him  during  his  ministry,  or  who  came  later 
under  the  immediate  influence  of  those  who 
had  done  so.  The  divine  glow  was,  indeed, 
wonderful,  but  it  was  brief. 

There  can  be  no  possible  doubt  in  our  minds 
as  to  what  Jesus'  message  was  as  we  read  the 
Synoptic  Gospels,  or  the  writings  of  Paul,  or 
even  as  we  study  the  Johannine  philosophy 
that  based  itself  on  that  message.  Differences 
of  interpretation  are  already  evident,  of  course, 
even  among  these  earliest  witnesses,  but  only 
such  differences  as  witness  most  naturally  to 
the  spiritual  honesty  that  filled  them  all. 

But  soon  there  was  a  change,  and  before 


80  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

three  centuries  had  passed,  change  had  given 
way  to  transformation.  The  emphasis  was  no 
longer  on  what  the  Master  taught.  The  church 
that  called  itself  by  his  name  was  feeling  its 
way  toward  the  assertion  of  claims  that  he 
denied,  and  that  his  apostles  abhorred. 

He  and  they  had  pleaded  with  men  to  walk 
as  children  of  God.  But  to  walk  as  children 
of  God  was  soon  to  mean  a  totally  different 
thing — namely,  to  walk  in  obedience  to  an 
ecclesiastical  authority.  He  had  no  thought  of 
creed,  but  now  the  greatest  metaphysicians  of 
that  or  of  any  age  bent  their  Grecian  genius 
to  the  formulating  of  a  vast  literature  of 
dogma,  which  only  the  learned  could  under- 
stand, but  which  all  were  enjoined  to  receive. 

Next  we  see  arise  a  Militant  Papacy,  steadily 
replacing  the  free  and  simple  idealism  of 
Jesus  by  its  "imperial,  ecclesiastical,  paternal, 
benevolent  tyranny."  " My  kingdom  is  not  of 
this  world,"  said  the  dying  Christ.  "  Nay,  but 
in  thy  high  name  I  claim  and  take  the  king- 
doms of  this  world,"  cried  ever  victorious 
Rome.  And  long  centuries  were  to  pass  be- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  81 

fore  this  falsest  of  all  claims  made  on  behalf 
of  the  Christian  religion  was,  in  the  name  of 
the  common  rights  of  man,  repudiated.  Alas ! 
even  yet  Rome's  fatal  insistence  on  it  has 
distracted  France,  and  numbs  and  blights 
religious  life  in  Catholic  Eurojie. 

No,  indeed,  the  religion  that  is  ours  bears 
everywhere  the  marks  of  inevitable  change  and 
growth  ;  whether  for  evil  or  for  good,  whether 
our  judgment  approves  these  changes  or  no, 
let  us  recognize  them.  Especially  let  us,  who 
are  Americans,  remember  that  Protestantism, 
in  some  branch  of  which  most  of  us  have  been 
brought  up,  is  responsible  for  its  full  share 
of  changes  wrought.  The  fact  that  it  made  a 
sacred  book  its  oracle,  when  it  refused  obed- 
ience to  the  Roman  primacy,  could  not  save 
the  Protestant  movement  from  the  law  of 
growth  and  change.  Protestantism  had  to  be. 
It  was  the  legitimate  child  of  the  Renaissance. 
The  flush  of  new  light,  the  tide  of  new  learn- 
ing that  swept  over  the  Western  world,  re- 
sulted in  the  breaking  of  all  manner  of  sacred 
"  pots,"  the  bursting  of  venerable  wine-skins. 


82  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

Protestantism  saw  clearly  enough  that  the 
true  throne  of  the  Father  God  must  be  the 
mind  of  man;  that  the  final  seal  of  divine  au- 
thority could  be  nowhere  else  than  in  the 
mind  of  man.  Protestantism  was,  on  its  spir- 
itual side  at  least  (and  it  had  other  sides),  the 
re-assertion  —  almost  the  re-discovery  —  of 
the  very  core  of  Jesus'  gospel.  "  Verily  I  say 
to  you  the  hour  cometh  when  neither  in  this 
mountain  nor  yet  at  Jerusalem  shall  ye  wor- 
ship the  Father.  God  is  a  spirit,  and  they  that 
worship  him  must  worship  him  in  spirit  and 
in  truth.  For  the  Father  seeketh  such  to  wor- 
ship him."  It  therefore  put  the  pope  and  the 
priest  in  their  right  place.  Temples,  to  the 
Protestant,  were  but  pictures  of  the  temple 
of  the  universe ;  sacrifices,  but  symbols  of  the 
divine  order  of  the  world ;  priests,  but  human 
tokens  of,  and  witnesses  to,  what  man's  life 
of  glad  service  was  meant  to  be. 

At  least  logically  Protestantism  should  have 
held  this  ground.  But  the  long  custom  of  the 
ages  was  too  much  for  it.  The  movement 
dared  not  trust  itself  to  the  impulse  and  direc- 


THE   RELIGION   OF  JESUS  83 

tion  of  the  Divine  Spirit.  It  too  sought  to 
establish  a  final  court  of  religious  appeal  other 
than  Christ  had  established.  Rome  had  proved 
herself  self-seeking  and  false  — a  blind  leader 
of  the  blind.  Western  civilization  turned  from 
her  to  the  sacred  writings,  rejected  her  absolut- 
ism, and  created  a  new  absolutism  of  the  Bible. 

It  is  hard  to  see  what  other  course  the  re- 
formers of  the  sixteenth  century  could  have 
pursued.  All  Christendom  had  been  trained 
to  believe  that  the  Bible  was  a  verbally  in- 
spired book.  Those  who  parted  company  with 
Rome  rejected  her  interpretation  of  it,  de- 
nounced her  for  her  denial  of  the  book  to  the 
laity,  for  her  sophistifications,  misrepresenta- 
tions, and  perversions  of  its  plainest  teachings. 
But  of  its  value  and  its  authority  they  were 
fully  convinced. 

Neither  had  Protestants  grasped  the  mighty 
doctrine  of  the  "  seed."  The  law  of  change, 
of  expansion,  of  growth,  had  been  rendered 
odious  to  them,  since  Rome  had  abused  it  to 
crush  freedom  and  enslave  the  human  mind. 
The  one  desire  of  her  best  leaders  was  to  get 


84  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

back  to  where  the  early  Church  had  been;  to 
sit  at  the  Master's  feet ;  to  stand,  clothed  with 
Pentecost's  persuading,  inspiring  power,  by 
his  empty  grave. 

Who  to-day  shall  deny  the  essential  nobil- 
ity of  that  ideal?  It  gave  new  hope  to  men 
of  courage  and  learning.  It  consecrated  the 
cradle  of  the  modern  spirit.  It  baptized  science 
into  the  name  of  Jesus.  And  yet  I  think  all 
will  admit  that  Protestantism,  as  a  final  ex- 
pression of  Christ's  religion,  has  failed.  It  had 
its  day.  It  did  its  work,  just  as  well,  and  no 
better  than  have  other  religious  movements. 
It  was  the  best  thing  men  saw  at  the  time.  It 
expressed  the  highest,  the  truest  they  knew, 
but  in  its  bosom  it  carried  the  seeds  of  its  own 
decay.  The  ultimate  appeal  was  to  a  sacred 
book,  and  a  book  —  no  matter  how  wonderful 
—  is  no  living  thing.  It  can  but  express  the 
ideas  of  the  men  who  wrote  it.  It  must  bear 
everywhere  the  marks  of  human  finality  and 
limitation.  The  mind  of  man  refuses  to  be 
bound.  It  ranges  the  universe;  lifts  itself  to 
the  stars ;  is  ever  hungry  for  God ;  seeks  him 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  85 

in  the  present;  hopes  for  him  in  the  future; 
rightly  refuses  any  creed  that  binds  it  to  the 
past.  If  he  is,  he  is  self-revealing.  If  we  are 
his  children,  then  to  us  he  must  speak.  He 
spoke  to  our  fathers,  and  in  his  spoken  word 
to  them  we  rejoice ;  but  their  wanderings  are 
over  —  ours  are  but  begun.  Their  questions 
are  answered ;  ours  press  sorely  on  us  for  an- 
swer. A  God  truly  to  help  in  time  of  need 
must  ever  inspire  and  help  that  time.  A  living 
age  demands  a  living  God,  and  if  it  revolts 
from  the  false  leadership  of  a  Roman  priest 
who  has  proved  to  reasonable  men  that  he  has 
made  the  truth  of  God  of  none  effect  to  them 
by  his  traditions,  it  cannot  (let  it  try  never  so 
patiently)  find  the  satisfaction  and  guidance 
it  needs  in  the  pages  of  a  book,  however  sa- 
cred, the  records  of  a  literature,  however  glori- 
ous. 

Here  was  the  Protestant  quandary.  Rome 
had  adopted  the  right  idea.  Rome  had  always 
set  herself  to  expand;  had  changed  with  the 
changing  times;  and  had  during  the  dark 
centuries  been  a  rally  ing-point  against  despair, 


86  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

and  an  immense  power  for  good  in  the  world. 
She  had  truly  declared  that  the  voice  of  God 
must  ever  be  a  living  voice  —  God  speaking 
through  living  men.  So  far,  and  in  principle, 
she  was  evolutionary;  she  had  the  ages  on  her 
side;  she  was  right.  Her  error  lay  not  in  her 
theory,  but  in  her  practice.  Popular  Protest- 
antism confounded  these  two,  and,  moved  by 
a  not  unreasonable  wrath  against  what  Rome 
had  accomplished,  set  aside  as  mistaken  both 
her  theory  and  her  practice.  I  say  moved  by 
a  not  unreasonable  wrath,  for  remember,  the 
Reformation  movement  in  Germany,  in  Switz- 
erland, and  in  England,  was  largely  influenced 
by  men  smarting  under  a  sense  of  bitter 
wrong.  The  awful  Christlessness  of  Rome's 
practice  naturally  led  the  revolting  people  to 
abhor  and  refuse  the  precepts  by  which  she 
had  justified  it. 

Here  let  me  digress  for  a  moment.  Mark 
you,  my  friends,  this  protest  against  the  ways 
of  Rome  is  no  outworn  protest  that  has  lost 
its  meaning  and  its  vigor  because  the  protesters 
who  voiced  the  great  revolt  of  Reformation 


THE   RELIGION  OF  JESUS  87 

times  made  many  and  great  mistakes  them- 
selves, and  were  succeeded  by  others  who  added 
crime  to  mistake.  No,  with  new  insistence, 
backed  by  new  witnesses,  it  is  sure  to  rise 
and  rise  again.  History  is  opening  its  half- 
forgotten,  partially  understood  page  to  the 
modern  scholar,  and  the  verdict  of  history  on 
Rome's  ways  and  policies,  past  and  present, 
cannot  be  mistaken,  cannot  be  ignored.  Where 
she  has  had  power  undivided,  unchecked,  she 
has  crushed  out  liberty  and  truth,  she  has  set 
back  civilization,  she  has  refused  the  very 
bread  of  life  to  her  most  faithful  children. 
The  awful  story  of  her  doings  in  Spain  is  yet 
but  partially  known,1  but  age-long  betrayal 
of  the  great  French  people  is  beginning  to  be 
understood  in  France,  though  it  •  is  not  yet 
appreciated  outside  its  borders. 

1  In  1522,  the  year  in  which  Luther  was  summoned  to  the 
Diet  of  Worms,  Ignatius  Loyola  published  the  only  book  he 
ever  wrote,  his  Spiritual  Exercises.  The  book  was  intended  as 
a  devotional  guide  for  those  who  would  enter  his  order  of  the 
Society  of  Jesus.  In  the  concluding  rules  of  the  exercise, 
Loyola  says  :  "  Laying  aside  all  private  judgment,  we  ought 
to  obey  in  all  things  the  Hierarchical  Church  ;  to  praise  con- 
fession, to  praise  the  frequent  hearing  of  the  mass,  to  praise 


88  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

Rome  betrayed,  oppressed,  and  slaughtered, 
for  five  hundred  long  years,  the  Puritans  of 
France,  and  France  was  the  cradle  of  Puritan- 
ism. Three  hundred  years  before  English 
Wycliffe  preached  and  printed,  Puritanism 
had  its  birth  in  Southern  France.  Like  all 
great  movements,  it  had  its  faults,  its  excesses, 
its  limitations.  But  making  full  allowance  for 
them  all,  Puritanism  in  France  and  anywhere 
else  mightily  strove  for  those  in  valuable  human 
rights  and  duties,  in  the  exercise  of  which  alone 
do  nations  rise  to  greatness  and  men  ripen  to 
character. 

Rome  set  herself  to  stamp  into  the  soil 
whence  it  sprang,  this  most  vital  seed  of  pro- 
gress. She  was  not  strong  enough  to  do  it 

the  religious  orders  and  the  vows  of  religion,  to  praise  the 
relics  of  saints,  to  praise  the  fasts  and  penances,  to  praise 
the  buildings  and  ornaments,  always  to  defend,  and  never 
to  impugn,  the  precepts  of  the  Church,  to  approve  the 
constitutions,  recommendations,  and  habits  of  life  of  our 
superiors,  whether  praiseivorthy  or  not,  for  to  speak  against 
them  before  the  lower  classes  would  give  rise  to  mur- 
murs and  scandal,  and  thus  the  people  would  be  irritated 
against  their  temporal  or  spiritual  rulers;  to  praise  scholas- 
tic theology,  to  hold  that  toe  believe  what  seems  to  us  white  to 
he  black,  if  the  Hierarchical  Church  so  defines  it."  This  was 
Jesuitry,  and  it  ruined  Spain. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  89 

alone,  and  cunningly  she  set  herself  to  wheedle 
and  seduce  the  Kings  of  France  to  aid  in  the 
crusade.  The  scattered  political  units  that 
were  to  make  the  great  French  nation  of  the 
future  had  not  yet  been  welded  to  unity.  She 
would  help  the  central  power  to  an  absolute 
dominion,  on  the  condition  that  Puritan  heresy 
was  utterly  destroyed.  And  so  the  knife  of  the 
butcher  was  blessed  by  the  vice-regent  of  God, 
and  bloody  work  began  that  was  to  go  on, 
with  slight  intermission,  for  almost  five  hun- 
dred years,  till  the  final  blow,  the  revocation 
of  the  Edict  of  Nantes,  fell.  If  the  secular 
powers  of  France  sickened,  as  they  often  did, 
of  the  job,  Rome  stood  ever  ready,  lending 
her  superb  ecclesiastical  machinery  to  aid  the 
crown  in  the  consolidation  of  its  powers;  lift- 
ing the  throne  of  France  to  a  yet  more  auto- 
cratic authority. 

This  devil's  work,  as  I  say,  went  on  for 
centuries,  while  slowly  the  best  life-blood  of  a 
great  nation  was  drained  away.  Europe,  fully 
occupied  with  its  own  affairs,  dominated  by 
the  Papacy,  did  not  interfere.    It  was  easy  to 


90  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

pervert  the  issue  and  disarm  such  weak  and 
ineffectual  sympathy  as  might  arise  outside  the 
French  border.  So  at  last  Rome  was  supreme, 
the  French  kings  could  debauch  France  and 
plunder  her  at  their  will ;  and  Puritanism  died 
in  the  breach  or  at  the  stake,  or  went  over-seas, 
to  help  make  rival  nations  such  as  England 
and  Holland  great,  and,  in  time,  America  free. 

Then  at  last  retribution  came.  Those  forces, 
making  for  all  that  moderation  and  constitu- 
tionalism mean,  had  been  forbidden  place  in 
France,  and  France  herself  must  pay  the  price. 
Innocent  and  guilty — that  is  the  law  —  must 
suffer  together,  and  red  revolution  must  write, 
with  dripping  finger,  on  the  fairest  churches 
piety  had  ever  raised  to  the  worship  of  God, 
Christianity's  own  forgotten  motto,  that  since 
1170  had  in  France  been  denied  and  blas- 
phemed —  Liberty,  Fraternity,  Equality.  Ah, 
yes,  and  the  end  is  not  yet. 

These  doings  of  Rome  meant  a  great  deal 
to  the  fathers  of  the  Reformation.  The  mis- 
take they  made  was  natural,  but  for  Protestant- 
ism it  was  a  fatal  mistake.  It  rejected  Roman 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  91 

authority.  It  denied  that  any  man  or  group  of 
men  were  alone  and  before  all  others  ordained 
and  empowered  to  express  and  proclaim  the 
very  truth  of  Eternal  God,  were  his  vice-re- 
gents on  earth.  It  was  high  time  to  protest 
against  the  leadership  of  Rome.  Popery  had 
proved  itself  a  false  leader,  a  blind  guide. 
The  Vatican  had  failed  the  cause  of  truth, 
had  suppressed  and  strangled  the  seed,  as 
effectually  as  had  the  Pharisees  and  scribes 
of  our  Lord's  day.  And  the  crime  was  of 
deeper  dye  than  theirs,  for  heavily  and  darkly 
her  hands  were  stained  with  blood.  The  time 
for  protest  was,  indeed,  fully  come.  But  it  was 
a  grave  mistake  for  those  great  protesters  to 
seek  to  place  the  Bible  in  the  Vatican's  place. 
Once  the  Protestant  leaders  had  definitely 
broken  with  Rome,  they  in  their  turn  found 
themselves  confronted  with  the  age-long  prob- 
lem that  no  religious  organization  had  ever 
solved.  They  must  recast  the  truth  as  they 
saw  it,  for  the  new  time  ;  strip  its  teachings  of 
gloss  and  sophistry,  and  sow  a  fresh,  pure 
seed,  give  forth  fresh,  wholesome  bread  for 


92  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

the  food  of  man.  What  Buddhist  priest,  Jew- 
ish scribe,  Roman  council  had  failed  to  do, 
Protestant  synods  in  their  turn  must  attempt. 
They  of  course  failed,  but  who  shall  wonder 
at  their  failure.  It  was  failure  to  recognize  and 
heartily  accept  the  essential  nature  of  Christ's 
doctrine  of  the  seed  —  the  evolutionary  na- 
ture of  the  truth. 

Protestantism  does  not  need  here,  or  from 
me,  defence  or  vindication.  What  is  good  in 
us,  what  is  of  final  value  in  our  institutions, 
is  largely  owing  to  what  its  great  leaders  and 
martyrs  thought,  did,  and  suffered,  and  we  are 
not  likely  to  forget  it  or  be  ashamed  to  own 
our  debt.  But  to  pretend  that  as  a  religious 
system,  acceptable  to  thoughtful  men,  it  sat- 
isfies our  needs,  answers  our  questions,  or  pro- 
mises a  reasonable  guidance  for  the  future,  I 
think  very  few  are  prepared  to  do.  In  our  dis- 
satisfaction with  the  religious  aspects  of  Pro- 
testant churches  to-day,  let  us  at  least  ever 
keep  before  our  eyes  the  fact  of  the  greatness 
of  our  debt  to  that  world  movement  from 
which  they  sprang.    Those  men  of  the  six- 


THE   RELIGION   OF  JESUS  93 

teenth  century  relit  the  torch  of  truth  when  it 
was  well-nigh  quenched  in  the  thick  darkness. 
Where  they  held  their  own,  first  in  the  school 
and  university,  and  then  on  bloody  battle-field, 
the  seed  grew.  Liberty  and  civilization  took 
root,  and  the  nations  prospered.  Where  they 
failed  partially,  progress  was  at  least  retarded, 
and  came  slowly,  if  it  came  at  all.  Where  they 
were  slaughtered,  where  in  tens  of  thousands 
they  were  burned,  as  in  Spain,  darkness  and 
tyranny  took  up  their  abode.  Men  gave  up 
hope  then,  and  are  giving  up  God  now. 

Some  who  have  kindly  listened  to  me  so  far 
may  say  that  I  have  unduly  emphasized  man's 
religious  failure  to  attain  any  standard  ap- 
proaching that  which  Jesus  established.  Let 
me  try  to  make  clear  that  such  has  not  been 
my  intention.  I  hold,  on  the  other  hand,  that 
we  are  all  too  much  inclined  to  undervalue  the 
progress  that  has  been  made  towards  his  ideal, 
in  the  religious  life  that  has  been  won ;  that 
we  dwell  with  too  faint  a  heart  on  the  spec- 
tacle of  moral  failure  and  hesitating  advance. 


94  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

On  the  whole,  man's  religious  sense  grows  and 
does  not  decay. 

For  like  a  child  sent  with  a  flickering  light 
To  find  his  way  across  a  dusky  night, 

Man  walks  the  world. 
Again  and  yet  again,  the  lamp  must  be  by  gusts  of  pas- 
sion slain. 
But  shall  not  He  that  sent  him  from  the  door 
Relight  the  lamp  once  more  and  yet  once  more  ? 

But  the  path  of  religious  progress  is  ever 
a  zigzag  path.  It  has  never  been  in  the  nature 
of  a  straight  line.  We  are  quicker  to  see  our 
forefathers'  crimes  than  their  virtues,  because 
our  own  heightened  sense  of  moral  obligation 
prevents  often  a  fair  comparison  between  our 
moral  standards  and  theirs,  while  the  dimness 
and  imperfection  of  our  best  historic  knowledge 
prevents  our  valuing,  as  we  should,  the  ideals 
they  strove  to  attain.  Their  best  may  not  have 
been  what  seems  to  us  best.  What  seemed  to 
them  reasonable,  the  means  they  took  to  reach 
it,  we  may  think  mistaken  or  immoral.  But 
surely  this  is  often  because  we  fail  to  put 
ourselves  back  in  those  remote  times.  Had  we 
been  where  and  what  they  were,  we  should 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  95 

have  done  as  they.  In  all  ages  since  man 
became  a  religious  being,  he  has  on  the  whole 
striven  to  give  the  best  he  has  to  the  best  he 
knoivs,  and  I  know  no  better  definition  of 
religion  than  that. 

Of  course  we  must  admit  that  "the  best 
men  knew  "  often  differed  not  only  in  degree, 
but  in  kind,  from  the  Gospel  of  Jesus ;  that 
its  identification  with  that  gospel  made  Christ's 
message  temporarily  of  none  effect  to  man ; 
nay,  that  often  its  mistaken  professors  used 
their  perverted  Christian  ideas  to  accomplish 
ends,  to  justify  means,  abhorrent  to  the  Mas- 
ter. So  much  is  undoubtedly  true.  Yet  since  into 
the  mind  of  man  the  seed  of  the  kingdom  had 
fallen,  —  fallen,  as  the  great  Seedsman  said, 
often  seemingly  in  vain,  fallen  on  rock  and  thorn 
and  highway,  yet  fallen,  too,  here  and  there 
on  good  ground,  —  through  all  the  changes 
and  chances  of  our  mortal  life,  it  must  ever 
somewhere  spring.  In  the  wide  field  of  hu- 
manity it  must  appear  and  reappear,  for  he 
who  sowed  said  its  destiny  was  to  live  and 
never  altogether  to  die. 


9G  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

I  am  persuaded  that  we  must  grasp  this 
sublime  truth  to-day  if  we  are  to  go  forth  to 
life's  tasks  in  a  spirit  of  joy  and  confidence, 
and  not  of  doubt  or  despair.  What  warrant 
have  we  for  believing  that  in  this,  our  half- 
instructed  time,  we  can  know  anything  approx- 
imating to  all  the  truth  about  Jesus  or  his 
nature  or  his  message  that  is  yet  to  be  known  ? 
Why  should  we  imagine  that  we  can  do  what 
no  generation  before  us  has  done  —  free  our- 
selves from  our  prejudices  and  our  selfish- 
nesses, and  so  yield  a  completely  intelligent 
and  perfect  obedience  to  the  divine  Son  of 
man?  To  fancy  for  a  moment  that  such  a 
service  is  possible  to  us  would  be  to  convict 
ourselves  of  blindest  Phariseeism ;  would  be  to 
claim  for  ourselves  a  singleness  of  eye,  a  pur- 
ity of  vision  that  no  inspired  apostle  dared  to 
claim.  No ;  at  best  we  can  but  hope,  with  good 
intention,  to  give  to  him  who  is  altogether 
worthy,  who  is  indeed  the  incarnation  and  sum- 
ming-up of  the  highest  we  know,  the  poor 
best  that  is  ours  to  give. 

I  have  dwelt  on  the  past,  because  imperfect 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  97 

as  is  our  knowledge  of  it  such  knowledge 
surely  tends  to  comfort  and  encourage  us  and 
not  to  depress.  If  we  are  uncertain  and  doubt- 
ful of  many  things,  the  great  ones  that  strove 
before  us  were  at  least  as  uncertain,  and  where 
they  cast  aside  all  uncertainty,  they  were  often 
farthest  from  the  truth.  When  they  were 
most  positive  they  were  often  most  wrong. 
Yet  the  sum  total  of  it  all  makes,  and  has 
made,  for  good. 

It  is  not  so  long  ago  since  the  fashion  of 
an  hour  denounced  Christianity,  denied  the 
good  of  religion,  on  the  ground  that  many 
of  the  monstrous  crimes  of  the  past  —  its 
tyrannies,  its  blood-shedding  —  were  done  in 
its  name.  Historic  science  to-day  admits  the 
facts,  but  repudiates  the  conclusions  drawn 
from  them. 

Cruel  and  tyrannous  men  there  have  been, 
there  will  yet  be,  for  human  nature  rises  but 
slowly  from  the  original  beast.  But  the  gentle- 
ness, the  holiness,  the  sublime  wisdom  and 
self-sacrifice  of  the  religion  of  Jesus  has  in 
darkest  times  modified  the  beast  in  man,  even 


98  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

where  it  has  been  powerless  to  eradicate  it. 
And  so  to  go  back  to  my  definition  of  religion. 
So  long  as  even  the  beast,  at  times,  felt  he 
should  bring  the  best  within  him  to  the  best 
that  was  far  above  him,  he  was  the  less  a  bad 
man,  the  less  tyrannous  neighbor,  for  even  the 
temporary  effort. 

Jesus  set  the  standard,  and  to  the  standard 
all  good  men  have  repaired  and  will  repair. 
Yes ;  so  far  as  Christendom's  past  is  visible  to 
us,  we  can  see  its  greatest  personalities  so  com- 
ing:. We  can  sometimes  note  their  mistakes. 
We  can  guess  at  least  at  the  temporary  or 
permanent  value  of  the  offerings  they  bring, 
the  additions  they  make  to  the  treasure  house 
of  their  God. 

Even  a  cursory  glance,  then,  at  religious 
history  is  enough  to  make  it  evident  that  the 
Christian  doctrines  most  of  us  were  brought, 
up  to  believe  without  question  have  undergone 
constant  and  radical  change;  that  our  religion 
as  we  received  it  from  our  fathers  was  a  very 
different  thing  from  the  religion  Jesus  sought 
to  teach  his  disciples,  and  which  they  in  their 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  99 

turn  sowed  among  men.  When  we  reject  parts 
of  it,  when  we  try  to  make  our  own  additions 
to  it,  when  we  seek  to  conform  it  to  what 
this  new  day  has  brought  us  of  truth,  we  are 
only  doing  what  all  good  men  have  done  be- 
fore us — we  are  honoring  and  not  dishonor- 
ing the  gospel  we  love;  we  are  following  our 
great  Master  in  the  very  way  he  bade  us  fol- 
low him;  we  are  doing  just  what  he  told  us 
to  do,  trusting  to  the  light  and  help  of  the 
Spirit,  whose  inspiring  guidance  he  promised 
should  not  fail  humanity  till  the  end  of  the 


ages. 


Now,  further,  I  want  to  remind  you  that 
this  process  of  growth  and  change  is  already 
unmistakably  present  in  the  earliest  years  of 
the  first  century.  Many  learned  writers  have 
pointed  this  out.  I  only  briefly  refer  to  it  as 
a  quite  unanswerable  evidence  of  the  accept- 
ance, sometimes  it  may  be  unconscious,  by  the 
greatest  of  the  early  Christian  teachers,  of 
Jesus'  doctrine  of  the  seed. 

Even  a  casual  reader  of  the  Bible  cannot 
fail  to  notice  the  difference  between  the  writ- 


100  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

ings  of  Paul  and  the  recorded  sayings  of  Jesus. 
Without  contradiction  we  may  claim  the  Apos- 
tle to  the  Gentiles  as  the  greatest  re-sower  of 
the  seed  in  the  first  century.  Where  did  Paul 
get  his  doctrine?  Some  have  supposed  that  he 
received  from  the  apostles  instruction  in  the 
teachings  of  Jesus,  and  from  these  developed 
his  system.  Paul  himself  denies  this.  He  ex- 
plicitly disclaims  any  such  proceeding.  "  I 
certify  you,  brethren,  that  the  gospel  which 
was  preached  of  me  is  not  after  man.  For  I 
neither  received  it  of  man,  neither  was  I 
taught  it,  but  by  the  revelation  of  Jesus 
Christ."  1  So  confident  was  he  of  his  own  in- 
spiration that  he  even  withstood  Peter,  claim- 
ing that  his  own  teaching  and  practice  on  an 
important  question  was  after  the  mind  of 
Christ,  and  that  the  elder  apostle  had  yielded 
sinfully  to  the  legalists.  Whether  Paul  was 
right  or  wrong  in  his  contention  is  of  but 
secondary  importance.  What  is  of  quite  first 
importance  is  the  ground  betook  in  defending 
his  position.  It  was  that  the  gospel  was  so  liv- 

i  See  Gal.  I,  11  and  12. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  101 

ing,  so  comprehensive  that  all  men  seeking  the 
truth,  Gentiles  as  well  as  Jews,  had  in  it  equal 
part.  The  fact  that  Jesus  himself  had  confined 
his  mission  to  the  lost  sheep  of  the  house  of 
Israel  does  not  seem  to  have  caused  the  Apos- 
tle to  the  Gentiles  any  hesitation  in  throwing 
wide  the  doors  of  the  early  Church  to  the 
world.  He  was  right.  He  was  truly  inspired. 
But  his  was  the  inspiration  of  a  radical,  of 
an  evolutionist. 

So  in  his  slowly  formulated  doctrines  of 
justification  by  faith,  of  sacrifice,  and  of  atone- 
ment, Paul  is  bent  on  welding  together  rab- 
binical thinking  and  Jewish  law,  in  which  his 
whole  mind  is  steeped,  with  the  teachings  of 
his  new-found  Master,  to  whom  his  whole 
heart  is  given.  Before  all  things,  he  is  im- 
pressed with  Jesus'  attitude  to  the  past.  "  I  am 
not  come  to  destroy  the  law  and  the  prophets, 
but  to  fulfil."  And  so  plainly  before  him 
rises  his  life  work.  What  can  Paul  do  better 
than  explain  the  old  sacrificial  system  of  the 
Jews  as  fulfilled  in  the  dying  of  the  Saviour  ? 

St.  Paul's  aim  was  a  true  aim.  He  gave  the 


102  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

best  he  had  to  the  best  he  knew,  and  for  long 
centuries  a  great  part  of  Christendom  was 
destined  to  take  his  teachings  as  the  final  word. 
But  new  light  has  come  with  new  times. 
Sacrifice,  as  the  law  of  our  universe,  means  a 
wider,  deeper,  more  universal  thing  to-day  than 
it  ever  did  before.  Atonement,  substitution, 
justification  are  no  longer  the  burning  ques- 
tions that  once  they  were,  and  this  lonely  little 
man,  who  stamped  our  religion  with  his  tre- 
mendous personality,  as  none  but  the  Master 
ever  did,  cannot  help  us  to-day  as  that  Mas- 
ter himself  can  help.  So  much  may  be  admit- 
ted, yet  never  can  we  over-pay  the  debt  we 
owe  to  St.  Paul.  The  universal  law  of  sacri- 
fice which  Jesus  taught  and  illustrated  is  a  far 
higher  law  than  the  Pauline  conception  of 
it,  but  Paul's  genius  gave  to  his  own  and 
to  succeeding  times  the  clearest  and  highest 
rendering  of  that  law  which  men  could  then 
understand.  And  yet  the  living  seed  must  in 
time  outgrow  and  crack  all  pots — even  the 
apostolic  pots ;  even  the  Pauline  pot. 

After   Paul's   day  men   went   everywhere 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  103 

sowing  the  word,  and  the  seed  fell  on  Grecian 
ground,  and  Grecian  metaphysician  and  philo- 
sopher received  it  gladly.  With  them,  too, 
it  sprang  up  and  bore  fruit.  They  must  give 
the  best  they  had  to  this  last,  best  life  that 
had  come  to  them.  For  centuries,  then,  the 
supremest  creed-makers  who  ever  lived  had 
their  way.  In  terms  of  human  reason  they  set 
themselves  to  explain  the  Infinite,  to  justify 
the  ways  of  God  to  men.  The  task  they  set 
themselves  was  an  impossible  task,  yet  could 
they  have  attempted  no  other,  for  for  it  they 
were  supremely  fitted.  Of  this  much  I  think 
we  may  be  sure  ;  where  they  gloriously  failed, 
none  may  ever  hope  to  succeed.  The  great 
creed -makers  had  their  day.  They  spared 
neither  themselves  nor  those  who  differed  from 
them.  They  help  us  to  know  rather  what  the 
Christianity  of  the  future  cannot  be  than 
what  it  can  be. 

Then  it  was  the  turn  of  the  practical  men 
of  the  world  to  shape  the  new  religion  to 
practical  ends.  As  Roman  power  trembled  to 
its  fall,  men  who  had  come  to  regard  Roman 


104  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

law  and  rule  as  the  world's  only  safeguards 
against  anarchy  looked  on  all  sides  to  find  some 
shelter  from  the  coming  storm.  The  hordes 
that  threatened  from  across  the  frontier  had 
been  largely  Christianized ;  why  was  it  not  then 
possible  to  bind  the  mistress  of  the  nations 
and  her  younger  rebellious  children  together, 
by  a  kindlier  and  more  enduring  tie  than  any 
which  Roman  despotism  had  ever  conceived 
of?  It  was  a  grand  dream. 

And  so  arose  the  idea  of  the  universal  Ro- 
man Church,  paramount  to  all  temporal  power. 
The  Lex  Romana  had  held  civilization  to- 
gether for  so  long,  men  had  grown  so  accus- 
tomed to  one  central  power,  that  any  division 
of  ultimate  authority  seemed  well-nigh  impos- 
sible. If  under  an  inferior  law,  if  subject  to  an 
often  brutal  code,  human  progress  had  been  so 
marked  and  general  peace  and  prosperity  had 
proved  so  stable,  to  what  high  ends  might  not 
mankind  attain  if  the  vicar  of  Christ  ascended 
the  throne  of  the  Caesars,  and  councils  of  holy 
bishops  met  to  decide  between  nation  and  na- 
tion ?  Thus  came  temporal  power  to  the  Central 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  105 

Roman  See — not  so  much  a  thing  grasped  at 
by  any  pontiff  as  a  duty  forced  on  the  Church 
by  the  dire  needs  of  a  distracted  time. 

Again  good  men  brought  the  best  they  had 
to  the  best  they  knew.  And  had  they  done 
otherwise,  the  dark  ages  that  followed  would 
probably  have  been  darker  than  they  were. 

Let  me  refer  to  one  movement  in  those 
dark  ages  that  very  plainly  illustrates  the 
truth  I  would  press  on  you — the  Crusades. 
That  these  caused  much  blood-shedding  can- 
not  be  denied.  They  were  of  their  time,  and 
the  times  were  superstitious  and  cruel.  The 
Sepulchre  was  sacred.  The  spirit  of  him  who 
rose  from  it  was  often  denied  or  unknown. 
Yet  surely  it  was  better  far  that  the  feudal 
tyrant  should  believe  that  there  was  some- 
thing worth  dying  for  besides  his  ill-gotten 
hoard,  and  that  that  sacred  thing  was  the 
cradle  of  his  religion,  than  that  he  should 
stay  at  home,  to  wage  ceaseless  war  on  his 
neighbors. 

Practically  the  crusader  may  have  been 
often  little  better  than  a  heathen  knight  who 


106  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

worshipped  his  own  bloody  sword.  Yet  when 
he  raised  aloft  its  iron  hilt,  and  on  its  crude 
cross  swore  the  oath  that  bound  him  to 
long  exile  and  often  to  death,  he  was  on 
the  way  to  be  a  better  man,  and  he  certainly 
was  destined,  though  he  knew  it  not,  to  bring 
back  to  Europe  the  seeds  of  enlightenment  and 
learning.  By  taking  the  cross,  unwittingly  he 
accomplished  a  greater  thing  than  he  aimed 
at  when  he  would  have  wrested  the  Sepulchre 
from  the  Saracen.  He  brought  East  and  West 
together,  opened  new  ways  for  commerce  and 
for  learning,  and  incidentally  the  worst  of 
his  band  helped  the  future  by  laying  down 
their  lives  to  uphold  the  past. 

The  crusader  knew  nothing  of  the  spirit  of 
pity  or  toleration.  We,  to  whom  toleration  is 
a  commonplace,  forget  how  slowly  it  spread 
among  men,  forget  how  long  and  dark  were 
the  ages  during  which  even  to  the  saintly  it 
was  almost  unknown.  Though  he  was  of  his 
time  and  lacked  pity,  the  crusader  was  often 
truly  and  profoundly  religious.  Simon  de 
Montfort,  leader  of  the  wholly  unjust  crusade 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  107 

against  the  French  Puritan  Albigenses  in 
1220,  is  busy  slaughtering  the  heretics,  men, 
women,  and  children.  Before  leading  an  as- 
sault on  an  Albigensian  stronghold,  he  ac- 
cording to  custom  will  attend  mass.  As  the 
mailed  knight  kneels  in  prayer,  a  squire  rushes 
to  his  side  and  hurriedly  whispers  that  a  des- 
perate sortie  has  been  made  by  the  garrison, 
and  that  the  immense  wooden  machinery  of 
his  attack  is  in  imminent  danger  of  total  de- 
struction.  He  must  come  at  once,  or  all  will 
be  lost.  Still  kneeling,  unmoved,  the  iron- 
headed  man  replies,  "  I  cannot  come  till  I  have 
looked  on  my  Christ."  Here  is  the  crusading 
spirit,  perhaps,  at  its  best.  It  knows  nothing 
of  pity ;  to  it  toleration  is  a  sin ;  but  even  the 
cruel  devastator's  religion  is  the  giving  of  the 
best  he  has  to  the  best  he  knows.  His  cross 
is  a  sword  hilt,  but  it  is  a  real  cross  all  the 
same. 

Yes ;  each  age  marks  and  moulds  the  seed 
truth  as  it  sees  it,  marks  it  after  its  own  like- 
ness, till  to  our  eyes  often  all  the  beauty  and 
worth  of  it  are  lost.  But  it  is  not  so.  For  lo, 


108  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

iii  some  mysterious  way  the  very  next  age  finds 
some  new  expression  for  it,  sees  a  new  hope, 
follows  a  new  light.  The  seed  is  not  dead,  but, 
as  the  Master  foretold,  has  been  re-sown.  The 
soil  and  climate  condition  the  growth  of  the 
seed ;  they  do  not  create  it.  Its  innermost  life 
is  a  thing  apart  from  them.  It  uses  them  rather 
than  they  it.  The  inner  vitality  of  the  God 
seed  in  as  all  is  the  insoluble  mystery  and 
glory  of  life. 

It  would  be  interesting  and  instructive  to 
follow  further  this  line  of  thought;  to  point 
out  how,  in  each  successive  movement  of  hu- 
man advance  since  the  days  of  St.  Paul,  the 
ideals  that  dominated  men,  whether  intellect- 
ual or  political,  profoundly  controlled  and  al- 
tered their  creeds.  As,  for  instance,  the  grand 
dream  of  the  temporal  power  faded,  as  success- 
ive pontiffs  proved  themselves  no  better  rulers 
than  the  emperors  had  been,  man's  irrepress- 
ible faith  again  fixes  its  eye  on  the  throne.  In 
it  surely  dwelt  something  of  a  divine  right,  and 
the  brave  souls  that  rallied  to  defend  its  lost 
cause,  against  the  rising  tide  of  Puritan  de- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  109 

mocracy,  fought  as  much  for  a  religious  as  for 
a  political  faith. 

So  down  to  our  own  time.  Many  who  long 
ago  cast  aside  as  an  ancient  fable  the  belief 
in  the  divine  right  of  kings  to  rule,  still  stoutly 
hold  to  their  fathers'  confidence  in  the  divine 
right  of  priests  to  mediate:  one  doctrine  as  vis- 
ionary as  the  other.  Both  of  them  are  but 
shadowy  hints  of  the  great  truths  behind  them, 
namely,  the  divine  right  of  man  to  rule  him- 
self, and  his  equally  divine  right  to  come  to 
God  for  himself.  At  infinite  cost  these  have 
been  won.  But  the  understanding  and  appli- 
cation of  them  to  character  and  society  is  not 
yet. 

Meanwhile  to  each  is  given  as  much  truth 
as  he  can  take  —  to  each  age  as  much  light  as 
it  can  obey. 

Is  not  the  wide  air,  after  the  cocoon, 

As  much  God  as  the  moth-soul  can  receive  ? 

Doth  not  God  give  the  child  within  the  womb 
Some  guess  to  set  him  groping  for  the  world, 
Some  blurred  reflection  answering  his  desire  ? 

We,  shut  in  this  blue  womb  of  the  doming  sky, 
Guess  and  grope  dimly  for  the  vast  of  God, 


110  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

And,  eyeless,  through  some  vague,  less  perfect  sense, 
Strive  for  a  sign  of  what  it  is  to  see. 

Christ's  doctrine,  then,  as  we  know  and  pro- 
fess it,  has  not  come  to  us  without  enduring 
many  and  radical  changes,  and  can  only  re- 
main a  vital  and  real  thing  to  us  by  reason  of 
more  and  continuous  change.  If  in  the  first 
instance  it  was  miraculously  given  (and  I  do 
not  say  it  was,  for  here  I  use  the  word  "  mir- 
aculous "  in  its  scientific  sense),  it  certainly 
was  not  miraculously  preserved.  When  Jesus 
had  spoken  of  what  was  to  follow  his  sowing, 
he  seems  carefully  to  avoid  the  idea  that  any 
specially  miraculous  interference  was  to  be  ex- 
pected or  desired  on  that  seed's  behalf.  Some 
was  to  fall  on  good  ground,  and  greatly  suc- 
ceed. Some  was  to  be  almost  choked  to  death 
by  worldly  influences.  And  yet  some  more  was 
quite  to  fail  —  evil  birds  were  to  carry  it  away. 
Then  he  adds  that  its  growing  depended  on 
and  was  nourished  by  the  normal  influences 
of  the  earth  receiving  it :  earth,  that  makes 
things  grow  "  we  know  not  how."  Such  was 
the  Master's  forecast,  and  has  not  history  ab- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  111 

solutely  fulfilled  it?  Things  have  but  fallen 
out  as  he  foreknew.  For  all  the  changes  that 
have  passed  on  it,  his  word  is  still  the  very 
seed  of  life  to  us  to-day  ;  our  guide  to  duty- 
doing  here,  our  hope  for  large  worthiness  else- 
where. Firmly,  reasonably,  I  think,  we  may 
believe  that  more,  and  not  less,  of  Jesus  Christ 
is  visible  to  men  to-day.  We  are  nearer  him, 
we  see  him  —  not  clearly,  it  is  true,  but  less 
indistinctly  than  those  of  bygone  times.  In 
spite  of  all  the  intervening  ages,  in  spite  of  all 
the  inevitable  confusions  and  distortions  of 
human  thinking,  though  strange  claims  have 
been  made  for  him  and  terrible  deeds  done  in 
his  holy  name,  still  the  real  man,  Christ  Jesus, 
remains  "  the  chief  among  ten  thousand  and 
the  altogether  lovely." 

Human  thought  has  perhaps  concentrated 
itself  on  him,  more  than  on  all  the  other  sons  of 
men  put  together.  Sometimes  it  has  ignored 
him,  but  not  for  long ;  next  it  has  acclaimed 
him;  but  whether  from  the  coverings  of  ne- 
glect or  the  robes  of  royalty,  Jesus  emerges 
the  same :  the  complete  Son  of  man,  who  knows 


112  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

what  is  in  man,  and  reveals  what  is  in  God. 
This  and  nothing  less  is  the  historic  truth  of 
the  matter.  We  know  nothing  in  human  story 
like  it.  It  is  the  real  miracle  of  Jesus. 

I  have  tried  to  show  you  that  what  is  handed 
forth  to  us  as  his  doctrine  to-day  is  in  large 
part  not  his  at  all.  I  have  done  this  not  by 
seeking  to  disprove,  point  by  point,  those  many 
orthodox  positions  on  which  still  totteringly 
stand  the  churches  of  to-day;  but  rather  by 
indicating  the  long  and  devious  processes  by 
which  religious  thought  has  come  down  to  our 
time,  processes  that  from  their  very  nature 
make  it  impossible  that  Christian  truth,  as  we 
have  received  it,  could  be  undeflled. 

A  great  river  may,  clear  and  pure,  burst 
from  its  mountain  home,  but  it  has  a  long 
journey  to  make  before  it  gains  the  sea.  On 
that  journey  it  loses  its  first  glorious  Alpine 
rush  as  it  traverses  the  plain.  Other  streams 
join  it  and  add  to  its  volume.  It  takes  tribute 
from  the  marsh  land  as  well  as  from  the 
sunny  meadow.  After  the  great  city  is  passed, 
its  tide  is  dank  and  foul.  Yet,  as  Kingsley  so 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  113 

beautifully  sang,  there  is  a  very  divine  quality 
of  self-cleansing  in  the  river,  and  so  most 
true  it  is  that  "  it  cleanses  its  stream  as  it 
hurries  along  to  the  calling  sea." 

The  river's  story  is  the  story  of  human 
life's  endeavor.  Truth  is  revealed  to  man  as 
the  river  comes :  at  times  purer  than  at  others ; 
at  times  so  befouled  in  flow  that  it  seems  to 
carry  only  death  on  its  dark  current.  Then 
once  again  obeying  its  law  of  self-purging,  and 
almost  free  from  stain  and  soilure,  its  mighty 
volume  brings  with  it  only  fertility  and  joy. 
Then  truly  it  seems  to  be  the  river  that  the 
writer  of  the  Revelation  saw  in  his  immortal 
vision :  "  A  river  of  water  of  life,  clear  as 
crystal,  proceeding  out  of  the  throne  of  God 
and  of  the  Lamb." 


114  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 


IV 


THE    NATURALNESS     AND     SUPERNATURALNESS 
OF    JESUS 

Verily,  verily,  I  say  unto  you,  He  that  believeth  on  me,  the 
works  that  I  do  shall  he  do  also ;  and  greater  works  than  these 
shall  he  do.  —  John  xiv,  12. 

I  said  in  my  last  lecture  that  what  mankind 
greatly  values  it  will  fiercely  guard.  This  is  a 
commonplace,  of  course,  yet  men  have  failed 
often  to  make  allowance  for  some  results  that 
have  arisen  from  this  most  natural  human 
predisposition.  They  have  been  startled  and 
dismayed  when  the  bars  and  barriers  their 
predecessors  have  painfully  built  round  their 
religious  treasure  houses  came  tumbling  down. 
They  have  then  bewailed  the  loss  of  what 
they  most  have  prized,  and  fiercely  they  turn 
on  the  reformers,  and  believe,  as  Mary  did  in 
the  dim  light  of  that  first  Easter  morning, 
that  these  have  taken  away  their  Lord.  Kelig- 
ious  defences  cost  the  builders  much  to  put 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  115 

up.  In  the  nature  of  things  they  must  cost 
something  to  take  down  when  the  time  to 
take  them  down  arrives. 

Supernaturalism  is  a  comprehensive  sort  of 
word,  and  might  perhaps  be  taken  as  an  explan- 
ation of  much  of  our  religious  barrage  and  de- 
fence. Even  the  merest  outline  of  the  genesis 
and  growth  of  belief  in  the  supernatural  is 
quite  beyond  the  scope  of  these  modest  lec- 
tures, but  I  would  point  to  the  historic  fact 
that  the  great  world  religions  are  all  alike  in 
claiming  a  supernatural  origin,  and  in  insist- 
ing, moreover,  that  the  supernatural  quality 
is  a  test  of  the  value  of  religion.  In  early 
days  it  could  not  be  otherwise.  The  world 
men  lived  in  was  a  pretty  rough,  hard  world. 
Light  and  darkness,  evil  and  good,  seemed  to 
carry  on  an  evenly  balanced  struggle,  and 
none  might  confidently  foretell  the  outcome. 

"  If  God  is  a  power  of  light  and  goodness, 
let  him  prove  himself  such.  If  he  cares  for 
man  in  his  lonely  up-hill  striving,  let  him 
show  some  sign  of  caring.  If  among  earth's 
tumultuous  voices  he  speaks,  let  it  be  in  tones 


116  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

of  compelling  power,  so  that  even  the  doubt- 
ing and  hesitating  may  be  forced  to  hear  and 
obey."  Naturally,  religious  passion  cried  out 
for  a  supernaturally  self-revealing  God,  and, 
ah,  which  of  us  does  not  know  well  how 
deeply,  hungrily,  in  our  heart  of  hearts  we 
crave  still  the  God  who  comes  to  us  by  way 
of  "the  sign"? 

Once  the  supernaturally  revealed  God  has 
spoken,  a  new  reason  for  the  continuous  dis- 
play of  the  supernatural  arises  as  a  matter  of 
course.  What  has  been  communicated  is  a 
matter  of  life  and  death  in  its  supreme  import- 
ance. It  must  be  guarded.  It  must  be  pre- 
served. The  gift  to  man  is  vain  if  it  be  not 
maintained  and  continued.  So  naturally  and 
very  soon  something  of  the  mystery  and  su- 
pernatural nature  of  the  revelation  comes  to 
be  attached  to  the  means  that  are  adopted  for 
its  preservation,  and  to  those  chosen  as  its 
appointed  guardians.  All  who  know  anything 
of  church  history  will  remember  how  con- 
stantly such  natural,  nay,  inevitable,  develop- 
ments have  occurred.  The  teachings  of  the 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  117 

infancy  of  Jesus,  the  doctrine  of  his  virgin 
birth,  and  as  a  logical  outwork  and  defence 
of  that  doctrine,  the  further  development  of 
it  into  the  quite  modern  pronouncement  of 
the  Roman  Church  as  to  the  Immaculate  Con- 
ception of  the  Virgin  Mary  herself,  must  at 
once  come  to  mind. 

To  many  truly  religious  and  also  thoughtful 
people  such  an  evolutionary  development  of 
the  Word  and  Seed  principle  of  Jesus  seems 
most  natural,  most  necessary.  Their  place, 
and  it  is  a  large  one,  is  in  the  great  Church 
of  Rome.  There  are  others  who,  while  they 
recognize  that  this  line  of  development  may 
have  been  the  most  natural  one  for  early 
Christianity  to  take,  may  have  indeed  been 
the  only  possible  development,  by  no  means 
admit  that  they  are  necessarily  bound  to  ac- 
cept its  conclusions.  It  belonged  to  a  time 
very  different  from  our  own.  It  was  based  on 
views  of  nature,  of  history,  and  of  man  that 
were  temporary  and  misleading.  They  find 
no  ground  for  it  in  the  teachings  of  Jesus 
himself,   no   trace   of   it   in    the   undisputed 


118  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

writings  of  St.  Paul.  It  outrages  their  sense 
of  reason,  for  to  accept  its  conclusions  neces- 
sarily cuts  them  off  from  modern  scholarship 
and  bars  them  from  the  ways  of  modern  re- 
search. If  to  be  a  Christian  means  that  a  man 
must  accept  and  confess  what  is  briefly  called 
the  supernatural  in  the  Christian  religion, 
then  Christians  they  will  not,  they  cannot  be. 
I  need  scarcely  say,  then,  that  the  question 
of  what  is  natural  and  supernatural  in  the  per- 
son and  teaching  of  Jesus  is  one  of  first  im- 
portance to-day.  Most  of  us  know  we  are  con- 
stantly thinking  on  this  question,  if  we  think 
on  religious  matters  at  all.  Here  the  wisest 
are  the  first  to  confess  a  profound  ignorance. 
They  know  well  that  theories  commending 
themselves  to  reverent  scholarship  to-day  may 
be  replaced  by  newer  and  more  satisfactory 
ones  to-morrow,  as  human  knowledge  pushes 
its  patient  way  a  little  further  into  the  vast 
territories  of  the  unknown.  Yet  dim  as  is  our 
light,  we  cannot  stifle  enquiry  if  we  would.  No 
uncertainty  in  our  own  conclusions,  no  differ- 
ence of  opinion  among  our  teachers  can  pre- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  119 

vent  our  pursuit  of  the  great  question  for 
ourselves.  Why  must  we,  it  may  be  asked, 
conscious  of  our  pitiful  incapacity,  insist  on 
occupying  ourselves  with  this  problem  which 
admittedly  is  so  much  too  hard  for  us?  Ah,  it 
is  because  in  our  inmost  hearts  we  know  that 
we  want  Jesus,  and  that  if  we  are  forced  to 
give  him  up,  if  he,  too,  like  so  many  beauti- 
ful visions  of  the  early  days,  is  doomed  to  fade 
away  in  the  stern  light  of  actuality,  then  with 
him  goes  from  us  forever  what  has  been  most 
beautiful  and  inspiring  in  human  life. 

Now  the  Saviour  Jesus  presented  to  most 
of  you  in  boyhood  was,  we  must  admit,  crudely 
supernatural.  It  was  his  unlikeness  to  us,  not 
his  unity  with  us,  that  was  usually  insisted 
upon.  His  supernaturalness,  not  his  natural- 
ness. And  now  that  most  educated  men  can  no 
longer  believe  in  the  supernatural,  the  Jesus 
who  to  them  in  their  youth  was  ever  presented 
clothed  in  the  supernatural  is  becoming  a  faded 
figure,  a  less  real  personality.  Whether  we 
wish  it  or  not  therefore,  we  must,  if  we  would 
hold  him  fast,  ask,  How  far  was  the  real  Jesus 


120  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

supernatural?  Does  he  claim  supernatural 
powers?  Did  the  supernatural  in  his  days 
mean  to  men  what  it  has  come  to  mean  to-day? 

Whether  he  was  supernatural  or  not,  it  must 
at  least  be  evident  to  all  that  before  forming 
an  opinion,  before  taking  sides  on  this  great 
question,  we  owe  it  to  ourselves  first  of  all  to 
look  frankly,  and  if  we  can  without  bias,  at 
his  person  and  environment ;  at  himself,  and 
his  times,  and  his  teaching.  Only  then  may 
we  hope  to  form  some  not  altogether  mistaken 
idea  as  to  what  was  natural  about  him,  what 
maybe  accounted  for  by  ordinary  human  laws, 
by  circumstances,  by  the  limitations  of  his 
time,  that  are,  or  should  be,  well  known  and 
recognized;  and  what  in  his  person  and  his 
teachings  transcends  these. 

The  supernatural  is  amoving  point.  What 
is  inexplicable  to  one  age  is  plainly  explicable 
to  the  next.  I  need  not  argue  this,  for  so  much 
all  will  admit.  That  I  should  be  able  to  whis- 
per to  my  friend  one  thousand  miles  away 
would  have  been  deemed  a  stupendous  mir- 
acle less  than  one  hundred  years  ago.  It  is  not 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  121 

so  very  long  since  the,  to  us,  common  pheno- 
mena of  mesmerism,  thought  transference,  and 
second  sight  led  men  and  women  to  torture  and 
death.  We  forget  that  while  less  than  four 
hundred  martyrs  suffered  death  in  England, 
Scotland,  and  Ireland  during  Mary's  reign, 
over  four  thousand  witches,  men,  women,  and 
children,  too,  were  burned  and  drowned  in 
Scotland  alone  during  a  comparatively  short 
period.  The  men  who  tore  Scotland  free  from 
Kome  were  the  chief  actors  in  that  grim  trag- 
edy. Puritan  bigotry,  not  Koman  intolerance, 
was  guilty  of  that  insensate  folly.  In  those 
times,  to  deny  supernaturalism  was  to  court 
death. 

The  Jews  believed  that  by  miracle  the  cities 
of  the  plain  were  destroyed.  It  did  not  occur, 
I  fancy,  to  many  pious  people  who  were  shocked 
at  the  awful  news  of  Messina's  calamity  to  at- 
tribute to  miracle  the  earthquake  and  the  tidal 
wave  which  destroyed  a  quarter  of  a  million 
of  lives  in  a  few  moments. 

The  reason  of  this  difference  is  not  in  the 
facts  recorded,  but  in  our  point  of  view.  The 


122  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

earthquake  and  its  dreadful  results  are  just  as 
much  part  of  the  natural  order  under  which 
we  live  as  is  the  springing-up  in  your  garden 
to-day  of  the  myriads  of  daffodils  and  hya- 
cinths, that  so  beautifully  deck  the  lawns.  The 
man  of  science  tells  us  that  the  earthquake  is 
caused  by  the  shrinking  of  the  earth  crust. 
We  ourselves  know  that  given  sun,  soil,  rain, 
and  seed,  and  our  flower-beds  will  glow  in  the 
springtime.  Yet,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  how  the 
bulb  grows  from  its  rough  brown  unsightli- 
ness  to  odorous  beauty,  and  how  the  awful 
calamity  of  the  earthquake  is  prepared,  we  do 
not  know.  One  process  is  as  little  understood 
by  us  as  the  other.  Only  we  do  know  that 
both  are  according  to  nature's  workings,  not 
against  them — are  natural,  not  supernatural. 
Jesus  was  a  Jew.  His  beliefs  were  those  that 
would  in  the  ordinary  course  of  life  come  to 
a  profoundly  religious  Jew.  All  men  of  his 
race  and  time  believed  in  the  supernatural.  So 
did  he.  I  think  so  much  is  evident  to  any  care- 
ful reader  of  his  recorded  sayings  and  doings. 
But  I  think  also  it  is  no  less  certain  that  as  his 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  123 

brief  ministry  advanced,  he  changed,  in  sev- 
eral important  particulars,  his  views  and  his 
message. 

Such  passages  as,  "  If  I  had  not  come  and 
spoken  unto  them,  they  had  not  had  sin;  but 
now  they  have  no  cloak  for  their  sin";1  and, 
"  Woe  unto  thee,  Chorazin !  woe  unto  thee, 
Bethsaida!  for  if  the  mighty  works,  which 
were  done  in  you,  had  been  done  in  Tyre  and 
Sidon,  they  would  have  repented  long  ago  in 
sackcloth  and  ashes  " 2  seem  to  me  final  as  to 
his  profound  belief  in  the  value  of  his  own 
miracles.  On  the  other  hand,  signs  are  not 
wanting  that  towards  the  end  his  belief  in  the 
value  of  his  miracles  lessened.  He  is  officially 
approached  by  the  Pharisees  and  scribes,  who 
desire  him  to  show  them  a  sign.  "He  an- 
swered and  said  unto  them,  When  it  is  even- 
ing, ye  say,  It  will  be  fair  weather:  for  the 
sky  is  red.  And  in  the  morning,  It  will  be  foul 
weather  to-day :  for  the  sky  is  red  and  low- 
ring.  0  ye  hypocrites,  ye  can  discern  the  face 
of  the  sky ;  but  can  ye  not  discern  the  signs  of 

1  John  xv,  22.  2  Matt,  xi,  21. 


124  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

the  times?  A  wicked  and  adulterous  genera- 
tion seeketh  after  a  sign ;  and  there  shall  no 
sign  be  given  unto  it,  but  the  sign  of  the  pro- 
phet Jonas. "  1 

Again,  Jesus'  complaint,  addressed  to  the 
multitude  who  followed  him,  would  seem  to 
indicate  that  he  placed  a  very  real  value  on 
his  own  miracles  as  means  to  induce  faith  (if 
in  this  passage  the  writer  of  the  Fourth  Gos- 
pel has  preserved  for  us  a  saying  nowhere  else 
recorded) :  "Ye  seek  me,  not  because  ye  saw 
the  miracles,  but  because  ye  did  eat  of  the 
loaves,  and  were  filled. " 2 

I  think,  then,  on  the  whole,  that  the  modern 
theory,  commonly  advanced,  that  Jesus  at- 
tached but  secondary  importance  to  his  mira- 
cles, is  an  over-statement  of  the  case.  He  pro- 
foundly believed  in  the  supernatural  himself. 
Why  should  he  not  ?  Had  he  not  done  so  he 
would  have  been  no  real  messenger  to  his  time. 
The  apostles  after  him  believed  in  the  super- 
natural. No  reader  of  the  Acts  or  the  Epistles 
can  doubt  it.  The  speech  of  Peter,  on  the  day 
»  Matt,  xvi,  1-4.  a  John  vi,  26. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  125 

of  Pentecost,  whether  it  is  reported  accurately 
by  St.  Luke  or  not,  reproduces  without  doubt 
the  views  of  the  apostles  at  that  time.  The 
speaker  says:  "Jesus  of  Nazareth,  a  man  ap- 
proved of  God  among  you  by  miracles  and 
wonders  and  signs,  ...  ye  ...  by  wicked 
hands  have  crucified  and  slain.' '  Writing  to 
the  Corinthians,  some  thirty  years  later,  St. 
Paul  places  in  their  order  of  relative  value 
those  who  minister  in  the  Church :  "  God  hath 
set  some  in  the  church,  first  apostles,  second- 
arily prophets,  thirdly  teachers,  after  that  mir- 
acles, then  gifts  of  healings."  1 

The  testimony,  then,  of  miracles  was  still 
highly  regarded.  Let  us  recognize  this  frankly, 
and  as  frankly  declare  that  such  belief  was 
the  natural  belief  of  the  time,  and  had  no  bind- 
ing power  whatever  on  us.  The  supernatural 
is  a  movable  point. 

In  this  world  of  ours,  man  is  coming  to  his 

own,  but  he  wins  his  way  slowly.  For  long 

ages  he  must  have  held  his  cave's  mouth  with 

club  and  stone,  against  beasts  vastly  stronger 

1  1  Cor.  xii,  28. 


126  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

than  himself.  His  tool- wielding  hand  must 
have  served  him  well ;  and  when  at  last  he 
learned  the  secret  of  fire,  his  victory  was  as- 
sured. Even  then  it  was  on  an  unknown  and 
hostile  world  he  fared  forth.  How  little  could 
he  know ;  how  much  less  understand ;  and 
any  exercise  of  power  that  seemed  to  him,  who 
knew  nothing  as  yet  of  his  own  powers,  far 
more  than  human,  was  classed  as  miraculous, 
—  the  working  of  some  superior  being,  bene- 
ficent or  malevolent,  as  the  case  might  be. 

Experience  still  supplies  us  with  many  things 
we  cannot  understand,  but  we  no  longer  count 
them  as  supernatural.  Few  will  deny  to-day 

that  back  of  the  phenomena  I  referred  to  — 
mesmerism,  thought  transference,  clairvoy- 
ance, etc. — there  is  something  more  than  fraud. 
Prophets  there  have  been  (and  perhaps  are) 
who  saw,  by  gifts  we  cannot  gauge,  into  the 
future.  Men  and  women  are  here  to-day  whose 
hands  heal,  whose  touch  removes  pain.  I  had 
a  friend  —  a  doctor  —  who  practised  in  the 
Northwest  years  ago  when  harvesting  machin- 
ery was  new,  and  when  a  good  many  accidents 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  127 

occurred  from  its  use.  Among  his  neighbors 
he  found  a  Swedish  farmer  whose  touch  was 
of  extraordinary  power.  My  friend  assured 
me  that  with  a  few  passes  he  could  remove  the 
most  violent  pain,  and  that  by  his  aid,  and  in 
the  rough  circumstances  of  the  harvest  field, 
he  had  performed  numerous  operations,  some 
of  a  grave  nature.  The  man  was  quite  igno- 
rant, could  not  write,  made  no  boast  of  his 
powers,  and  would  never  receive  any  compen- 
sation for  what  he  did.  In  other  times  he  would 
have  been  worshipped  as  a  saint  or  burned  as 
a  witch. 

I  stayed  more  than  once  in  a  beautiful  sub- 
urban home  of  friends  of  mine  in  a  Southern 
city.  My  hostess,  the  mother  of  a  large  family, 
suffered  at  times  excruciatingly  from  pain  in 
the  temples.  She  was  for  years  treated  by  the 
ablest  medical  men  in  the  country,  but  the 
pain  would  return  and  in  so  violent  a  form 
that  her  reason  seemed  threatened ;  the  par- 
oxysms lasting  ten  to  fifteen  days.  At  last  it 
was  determined  to  remove  the  nerve  (a  very 
grave  operation,  I  am  told).  I  personally  knew 


128  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

the  great  physician  that  advised  this  operation 
as  a  last  resort.    Shortly  before  the  day  set, 

Mrs. 's  maid,  a  colored  woman,  said  to  her, 

"  Why  not  let  the  blacksmith  of  the  village 
see  if  he  could  not  help  her  —  he  was  often 

able  to  take  away  pain  by  rubbing.' '  Mrs. 's 

family  agreed.  The  man  came  two  or  three 
times,  and  till  her  death,  fifteen  years  later,  I 

believe  Mrs. had  no  return  of  that  pain. 

Here  there  are  two  instances  of  unaccounted- 
for  powers  which  have  come  under  my  own  ob- 
servation. To  deny  such  phenomena,  to  ascribe 
them  to  fraud,  is  to  be  really  credulous,  really 
unscientific.  There  are  many  things  in  this 
our  brief  life  that  no  philosophy  yet  formu- 
lated by  us  accounts  for  or  explains.  There 
are  around  and  within  us  constant  signs  and 
evidences  of  the  working  of  powers  we  as  yet 
do  not  understand.  But  bit  by  bit  we  are  com- 
ing to  understand  them,  coming  to  find  their 
true  place  for  them,  as  piece  by  piece  we  are 
surely  putting  together  the  puzzle  of  life. 

I  do  not  find  myself  able  to  believe  all  the 
miracles  ascribed  to  Jesus  in  the  gospels.  As 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  129 

I  have  showed  you,  it  is  not  reasonable  to 
suppose  that  we  have  in  those  gospels  any 
historic  or  accurate  account  of  what  actually 
took  place.  They  are  not,  they  do  not  pretend 
to  be,  history.  But  I  do  feel  it  most  natural 
to  believe  that  Jesus  did  work  convincing 
miracles  in  order  to  commend  his  message, 
and  far  from  believing  such  miracles  to  be 
impossible,  I  do  not  see  how  one,  like  the  Son 
of  man,  coming  at  the  time  he  did,  and  under 
the  circumstances  of  that  time,  could  be  any- 
thing else  than  a  miracle  worker.  Far  from 
believing  such  miracles  impossible,  I  think  it 
more  likely  that  in  time  to  come,  miracles 
will  not  offer  any  real  difficulty  to  the  thought- 
ful, but  that  our  children,  or  our  children's 
children,  may  yet  see  men  on  the  earth  who 
are  good  enough  and  great  enough  to  work 
them. 

Miracles  as  Jesus  wrought  them  were  alto- 
gether the  most  beautiful  and  natural  things 
possible.  To  think  of  them  as  breaks  in  God's 
law  is  illogical  and  absurd.  To  think  of  them 
as  natural  operations,  wrought  by  higher  good- 


130  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

ness  and  higher  power  working  in  completer 
harmony  with  and  understanding  of  the  divine 
will,  seems  to  me  reasonableness  itself. 

Thus  to  believe  in  the  resurrection  of  Jesus 
is  not  to  disbelieve  in  the  natural  order.  If 
death  is  the  extinction  of  life,  and  resurrection 
a  new  creation  of  life,  resurrection  would  then 
seem  incredible.  But  if  death  be  merely  the 
shedding  of  the  body  by  the  spirit,  the  sort 
of  dying  that  the  seed  dies,  then  resurrection 
is  the  springing  of  the  spirit  life  from  the 
body  life,  and  as  in  seed  sowing,  every  death 
is  but  a  resurrection. 

We  know  little  about  life;  it  is  still  a 
mystery  to  us.  We  ourselves  but  very  partially 
understand  ourselves.  Surely  there  are  powers 
latent  within  us  as  yet  untried,  unrecognized. 
When  Jesus  stood  among  men,  there  was  to 
them  revealed  a  new,  an  unknown  type  of 
man,  —  one  pervious,  as  man  had  not  yet  been 
pervious,  to  the  light,  knowledge,  and  power 
of  God;  one  full  of  the  Holy  Ghost  from 
his  mother's  womb.  His  was  a  will  at  one 
with   the   Father's,  a   hand   clasped   in   the 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  131 

Father's  hand.  Well  might  his  followers  cry, 
"  What  manner  of  man  is  this,  that  even  the 
winds  and  the  sea  obey  him?"  The  ruder 
earth  forces  shape  matter  after  an  eternal  law. 
These  forces  we  ourselves  have  proved  to  be 
more  and  more  obedient  to  man,  and  clearly 
we  men  are  called  to  exercise,  in  the  far  future, 
a  control  on  such  forces,  far  greater,  far  more 
subtle,  than  anything  we  can  accomplish  to- 
day. 

It  seems  to  me,  then,  far  from  unreasonable 
to  believe  that  Jesus,  the  uniquely  great  man, 
by  reason  of  his  perviousness  to  God,  found 
nature,  as  he  found  man,  plastic  to  his  hand. 
Is  it  not  true  that  we  can  measure  the  relat- 
ive advance  each  living  thing  has  made  in 
the  scales  of  being,  by  its  relative  perviousness 
to  influences  outside  itself?  All  life  as  we 
know  it  is  veiled  from  the  .Infinite  Life,  and 
life  may  be  spoken  of  as  of  lowly  or  high 
order,  in  proportion  to  the  thinness  or  thick- 
ness of  the  material  veils  enfolding  it,  hang- 
ing between  it  and  the  Infinite  Life. 

Here  are  creatures  scarcely  alive,  we  say. 


132  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

Such  life  as  they  have  is  only  apparent  to  pa- 
tient study.  They  seem  more  vegetable  than 
animal.  They  live,  but  their  life  draws  small 
sustenance  from  our  prime  necessities  of  light 
and  air.  From  these  they  are  shut  in  by 
twenty  thousand  feet  of  sunless  sea.  The 
depths  of  the  ocean  veil  them  from  our  life- 
giving  sun.  Leaving  ages  behind  us,  as  we 
rise  in  life's  scales,  we  come  on  other  veiled 
lives,  but  here  the  coverings  are  less  opaque 
and  are  quickly  drawn  aside.  Still  for  years 
many  inches  of  impervious  soil  must  cut  the 
locust's  larvae  off  from  daylight,  and  years  it 
must  pass  in  its  dark  earth  cradle,  before  it  can 
spread  its  wings  and  sing  its  brief  summer 
song.  The  frosts  of  many  a  winter,  the  rains 
of  many  a  spring,  and  the  persuasive  warmth 
of  many  a  summer  day  must  search  for  it  in 
the  dark  soil,  for  its  veil,  too,  is  thick  and 
impervious.  This  is  the  way  of  the  coral,  the 
way  of  the  locust,  the  way  of  the  world.  For 
how  did  planetary  life  come  to  be  at  all? 

Here  science  speaks  with  no  uncertain  voice. 
She  claims  authority,  and,  claiming  it,  she 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  133 

makes  on  us  a  stupendous  demand.  She  ex- 
pects us  to  accept,  almost  without  question, 
the  truth  of  a  miracle  so  great  that  I  do  not 
hesitate  to  say  all  the  miracles  of  revelation 
are  trivial  by  the  side  of  it.  Science  teaches 
us  that  all  the  beauty,  music,  knowledge  that 
go  to  make  up  what  we  understand  of  life 
have  come  out  of  a  swirling,  formless  hurri- 
cane of  fiery  cosmic  matter,  and  nothing  else 
—  out  of  a  chaos  so  dark  and  rude,  out  of  a 
blast  so  awful  and  death-dealing,  that  not  even 
to  an  educated  imagination  can  its  fury  be 
conceivable.  In  that  long  aeon  of  chaos,  death 
reigned,  not  life.  Chaos  seemed  to  rule,  not 
order.  Then  were  enthroned  powers  surely 
utterly  diabolic.  Any  sane,  overlooking  intel- 
ligence; any  man  even  of  genius  who  from 
some  distant  point  of  vantage  might  conceiv- 
ably have  surveyed  that  chaotic  storm,  could 
have  believed  nothing  less  than  that  he  was 
hearing  and  seeing,  in  its  awful  confusion  and 
roaring  turmoil,  nature's  articulated  curse.  In 
vast  spaces,  uncontrolled  and  uncontrollable, 
the  fiery  hurricane,  with  purposeless  fury,  prom- 


134  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

ised  to  rage  forever.  So  ages  passed,  and  were 
followed  by  other  ages,  and  some  sort  of 
comprehensible  order  grew,  till,  in  the  sub- 
lime language  of  the  Bible,  in  the  centre  of 
dense  vapor  earth  lifted  herself,  but  she  was 
"  without  form  and  void,  and  darkness  was  on 
the  face  of  the  deep."  What  had  love  or  wisdom 
to  do  with  such  a  gray,  lifeless  world  as  that? 
Then  other  ages  passed,  and  forth  from  the 
ocean  depths  there  came  forms  of  life,  grotesque 
and  awful,  that  lived  but  to  destroy.  Then 
other  ages  passed,  and  lo !  man  at  last  stood 
upon  his  feet.  But  what  a  man  !  Is  he  a  man? 
If  he  lifts  hands  of  prayer,  they  are  red  with 
blood.  He  is  dimly  aware  of  his  better  self, 
if  he  is  aware.  He  is  surely  liker  far  to  the 
beasts  from  which  he  came.  Cruel  and  lustful 
is  he ;  living  on  earth,  far  yet  from  ruling  it, 
barely  holding  his  own  against  savage  beasts 
and  threatening  hunger,  and  without  love  or 
faith  or  much  hope  —  just  the  blind  instinct 
to  live,  keeping  him  alive.  What  has  love  and 
wisdom  yet  to  do  with  such  a  world,  or  such 
a  product  of  the  world? 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  135 

I  have  not  time,  I  need  not  go  on  to  tell  the 
oft-told  tale  of  man's  later  progress,  his  de- 
feats, his  many  shames  ;  the  many  far  ebbings 
in  the  tide  of  his  advance,  the  many  fair  hopes 
of  men  and  of  nations  cast  down  and  betrayed ; 
of  civilizations  at  last  built  up  with  much  toil 
and  blood,  only  to  crumble  into  the  dust  again 
and  forever  to  be  lost  and  forgotten.  But  in 
spite  of  all  these  tragic  and  costly  changes, 
the  most  careless  student  can  now  perceive  a 
rise  in  life's  scale,  a  growing  towards  a  fuller 
self-consciousness;  a  widening  of  the  certainty 
of  responsibility,  a  vast  increase  of  the  sense 
of  pity,  and  a  steady  determination,  even 
when  storms  are  at  their  height,  to  keep  life's 
tiller  true.  Night  is  not  yet  passed,  nor  are  the 
storms  yet  over,  but  who  could  ever  have 
dreamed,  in  those  ages  so  far  behind  us,  who 
could  have  dreamed,  that  out  of  such  a  chaos 
should  have  come  forth  the  miracle,  man? 

Knowledge  is  not  yet  ours.  Day  may  not 
yet  have  dawned,  but  we  are  aware  of  a  rose 
of  coming  dawn  upon  the  gray  sea,  and  on  our 
earth,  once  without  form  and  void,  where  un- 


136  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

disturbed  darkness  reigned,  life's  veil  is  thin- 
ning fast,  and  life  is  pervious  to  light  as  none 
would  have  dared  to  dream  of  its  perviousness 
ages  ago.  Knowledge  already  is  beginning  to 
murmur  a  hesitating  "  amen "  to  the  deep 
abiding  hopes  born  of  instinct  and  religion, 
and  faith  ventures  to  believe  and  declare  that, 
as  out  of  that  swirling  chaos,  an  order,  an 
order  inconceivable  has  come,  so  again  out  of 
what  seems  to  us  much  confusion  and  wraste 
and  death,  in  the  mystery  of  that  order,  is  at 
last  to  emerge  a  state  of  being  as  much  com- 
pleter and  fairer  than  the  present  as  the  pre- 
sent is  fairer  than  the  past. 

Earth's  history  is  the  old  story  told  over  and 
over  again,  of  Orpheus  going  even  to  hell  to 
claim  his  bride.  Why  man  needs  chaos  and  hell, 
and  why  by  an  irresistible  divine  song-call  he  is 
ever  lifted  out  of  it,  who  can  say  ?  But  man 
came  from  chaos,  and  what  may  not  yet  come 
from  man? 

Surely  it  is  reasonable  to  believe  that  back 
of  all  veilings,  penetrating  at  last  all  veils  (for 
he  has  hung  them),  God  our   Father  lives, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  137 

above  all,  through  all,  over  all  from  the  be- 
ginning ;  that  all  creation  is  but  the  burying- 
away  of  life,  the  sowing  of  divine  seedbeds. 
Whether  it  be  in  the  ravines  of  the  great  sea, 
or  the  gauzy  veilings  of  the  silkworm,  or  the 
mysteriously  sensitive  gray  matter  of  the  hu- 
man brain,  all  creation  is  but  a  temporary 
veiling  of  life  from  God  —  a  going-forth  from 
Him,  that  it  may  return  to  Him.  "  For  yet 
doth  he  ever  devise  means,  whereby  his  ban- 
ished be  not  expelled  from  him  "  (as  the  wise 
woman  said  long  ago  to  the  mourning  king). 
His  banished  ones  own  instinctively  their  ban- 
ishment, and  strangely  and  variously  try  to 
come  home.  That  is  the  meaning  surely  of 
life's  struggle  up.  So  the  larvae  struggles  for  a 
winged  life,  and  the  monkey  fought  his  way 
to  a  man's  life,  and  manhood  stretches  out 
longing,  empty  arms  of  prayer  and  calls  upon 
his  God  for  a  divine  life. 

God  of  the  granite  and  the  rose, 

Soul  of  the  sparrow  and  the  bee, 
The  mighty  tide  of  being  rolls, 

Through  countless  channels,  Lord,  from  Thee. 


138  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

It  springs  to  life  in  grass  and  flowers, 
Through  every  grade  of  being  runs, 

While  from  creation's  utmost  towers, 
Its  glory  streams  in  stars  and  suns. 

These  are  more  than  dreams.  They  are 
hopes  founded  by  multitudes  not  only  on 
growing  knowledge  and  widening  experience, 
but  on  a  deeper  understanding  of  the  uni- 
versal longings  and  purposes  of  mankind. 

Jesus  was  a  man  supremely  pervious  to  God. 
Shelley  dreamed  a  dream  long  ago  —  one  of 
the  most  beautiful  dreams  that  ever  visited  a 
poet.  He  said  :  — 

Life  like  a  dome  of  many-colored  glass 
Stains  the  white  radiance  of  Eternity. 

He  saw  the  eternal  life  slowly  penetrating 
our  lower  life,  shining  through  it.  William 
James,  in  his  luminous  lecture  on  Immortality, 
amplifies  that  thought.  The  measure  of  the 
scale  of  living  things  may  be  the  thickness  or 
thinness  of  the  veil  they  present  to  God's 
"white  radiance.' ' 

Surely  of  this  much  we  may  be  sure,  that 
when  we  come  to  study  ourselves,  we  cannot 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  139 

but  admit  that  life's  veilings  have  thinned  mar- 
vellously. See  man  preparing  for  his  moment- 
ous career !  Nine  months  of  silence,  seeing 
not,  knowing  not,  yet  wonderful  things  of  feet 
and  hands  and  brain,  of  tongue  and  taste,  of 
eyes  and  heart,  waiting  for  a  baby's  resurrec- 
tion. Man's  first  life  waiting  to  issue  forth  into 
the  large  world  —  and  mark,  not  ages  to  wait, 
not  years,  but  only  nine  short  months  before 
he  reaches  the  sunlight;  semi-conscious  moth- 
erhood meanwhile  playing  its  mysterious  and 
as  yet  but  partially  understood  part. 

Then  after  birth  begins  the  second  life  of 
man.  Now  the  veil  is  thinner  still.  Invariable 
law  and  fixed  order  lay  their  yoke  on  the  grow- 
ing thing,  yet  soft  hands  and  watchful  care 
attend  it,  shielding  it  from  danger,  saving  it 
from  harm.  Ah,  how  grudgingly  love  sees  life 
fare  forth !  How  yearningly  we  would  save  it 
all  pain  and  penalty  if  we  might ;  take  its  first 
woes  on  our  parent  shoulders  if  we  but  could  ! 
It  may  not  be.  So  we  set  our  children  to  their 
childish  tasks.  We  exact  obedience  and  effort, 
and  insist  on  responsibility.    For  we  would 


140  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

make  them  men,  to  know  manhood's  joy  and 
duties,  and  in  time  take  up  and  finish  man- 
hood's tasks.  They  must  finish  what  we  began. 
They  must  succeed  where  we  failed. 

Sometimes  we  think  that  it  is  into  a  cold 
and  heedless  world  we  usher  our  children.  We 
forget  that  our  loving  care,  our  passionate 
tenderness  are  but  part  and  parcel  of  that 
world's  order.  The  world  forces  and  influences 
reach  them,  it  is  true,  but  these  were  meant 
to  reach  them  through  us.  As  for  nine  months 
the  mother's  bosom  sheltered  man's  first  life, 
so  for  an  indefinitely  long  term  parental  love 
was  ordained  to  shelter  his  second.  Love,  care, 
and  wisdom  tend  life  as  it  makes  its  fateful 
entrance.  Childhood  is  pervious  to  parentage. 
What  we  have  won,  what  we  are,  in  large  part 
we  pass  on  to  our  children. 

Now  what  I  am  trying  to  make  clear  to  you 
is  that  as  our  children  are  pervious  to  all  we 
are  as  their  parents,  so  are  we  pervious  to  God. 
Our  plan  of  life  for  our  children  in  the  small 
is  God's  plan  for  all  of  us  his  children  in  the 
large.  Man  is  a  demigod.  He  rules  by  divine 


.   THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  141 

right  this  earth  which  is  his  kingdom.  There 
is  the  unaccountable,  there  is  the  semi-mirac- 
ulous within  him.  Of  us  poor  men  even  it  is 
true,  "  What  manner  of  man  is  this,  that  even 
the  winds  and  the  sea  obey  him  ?  "  He  trans- 
forms the  earth  on  which  he  lives.  He  yokes 
to  his  car  earth's  forces.  More  and  more  he 
compels  nature  to  do  his  bidding,  and  pro- 
foundly he  changes  the  face  of  the  world.  And 
beyond  even  these  powers  there  belongs  to 
him  the  power  of  choice;  he  can  sink  to  the 
beast  whence  he  came,  or  rise  by  self-mastery 
to  the  heights  of  genius  or  of  sainthood.  He 
can  turn  on  or  off  the  light  of  life,  and  so  make 
his  soul  a  holy  temple  or  an  unclean  pigsty. 

It  seems  to  me,  the  more  I  think  on  human 
life,  that  its  history  has  been,  and  yet  shall  be, 
just  one  long  filling  of  the  splendid  promise 
and  command  made  and  given  to  Adam  in  the 
legend  of  Genesis,  "Have  thou  dominion." 
Forth  from  the  faultless  irresponsibilities  of 
the  garden  life  man  had  to  pass,  that  he  might 
take  up  the  great  task  of  being  a  man.  Noth- 
ing henceforth  comes  to  him  without  toil.  His 


142  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

very  daily  bread  shall  depend  on  the  sweat  of 
his  brow,  b  ut  as  he  fits  himself  for  lordship,  lord- 
ship is  given  him.  The  secrets,  the  beauties, 
the  powers  lying  unused  and  dormant  in  his 
kingdom,  are  only  waiting  for  his  compelling 
command.  He  is  the  child  of  all  the  long  past. 
In  him,  and  in  him  alone,  can  her  ages  of  tra- 
vail be  rewarded.  He  is  both  her  explanation 
and  her  king.  As  St.  Paul  magnificently  put 
it,  "  The  whole  creation  groaneth  and  travail- 
eth,  .  .  .  waiting  for  the  manifestation  of  the 
sons  of  God."1 

Here  at  last  in  little  Judea  stands  the  Son 
of  man.  He  is  fit  to  be  King,  and  King  he 
therefore  is,  for  he  is  supremely  pervious  to 
God.  Such  was  the  impression  Jesus  made  on 
the  ignorant  but  honest  men  who  companied 
with  him  from  the  first,  and  though  much 
that  must  have  seemed  utterly  supernatural  to 
them  may  to  us  seem  natural,  surely  our 
knowledge  of  what  man  can  do,  and  of  what 
man  did  do,  is  so  necessarily  imperfect  that 
the  time  for  dogmatizing  has  not  arrived. 

1  Romans  viii,  19,  22. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  143 

Furthermore,  those  who  charge  orthodox 
religion  with  alone  maintaining,  in  the  face  of 
scientific  evidence  to  the  contrary,  an  impos- 
sible doctrine  of  the  supernatural,  forget  or 
ignore  the  fact  that  there  is  everywhere  among 
plain  people  a  tacit  recognition  and  admission 
of  the  truth  of  supernaturalism  to-day.  Such 
admission  is  implied  and  understood  in  the 
laws  of  the  land.  "By  act  of  God,"  so  old 
laws  still  read.  And  so  not  the  priesthood 
alone,  but  religious  and  irreligious  people 
alike,  philosophers  and  teachers,  orthodox  and 
heretic,  kings  and  commoners,  all  professedly 
still  believe  in  a  God  who  acts  on  human 
affairs,  not  in  one  way,  but  in  two  different 
ways  —  one  an  orderly  way,  acting  in  and  by 
the  mind  and  work  of  man  and  nature's  pro- 
cesses; the  other,  an  outside  way,  an  interfer- 
ing way.  God  has,  of  course,  in  the  common 
belief,  his  laws;  these  are  beneficent  and  work 
on  the  whole  for  good.  But  he  is  not  confined 
to  these,  but  from  time  to  time  can  and  does, 
in  response  to  special  prayer  and  appeal  made 
to  him,  sweep  down,  as  it  were,  from  heavenly 


144  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

calm  into  the  troubled  vortex  of  mundane  af- 
fairs, and,  by  a  sudden  exercise  of  divine  en- 
ergy, reassert  his  will  and  indicate  his  author- 
ity. This  was  the  old  belief  of  the  Jews.  All 
early  religions  are  full  of  such  a  faith  and 
strong  in  the  assurance  of  a  divine  partiality. 
In  such  a  belief  Moslem,  Calvinist,  and  Cath- 
olic alike  went  forth  to  accomplish  and  did 
accomplish  the  greatest  tasks  of  men.  Those 
were  days  in  which  men  heartily  believed  in 
verbal  inspiration  and  communicating  voices 
from  heaven.  We  who  have  ceased  to  believe 
in  the  value  of  such  means  of  divine  leading 
have  not  yet  succeeded  in  replacing  them  with 
more  reasonable  opinions. 

The  old  is  out  of  date,  the  new  is  not  yet  born. 

The  form  of  the  old,  mummified,  dusty 
dead  remains  to  trouble  us. 

One  more  important  point  I  must  raise  be- 
fore I  leave  this  subject.  The  interfering,  the 
partial,  the  supernaturally  acting  God  is  still 
the  God  usually  given  to  childhood.  And 
here  we  do  our  children  a  cruel  wrong.  At 
school,  at  college,  our  view  of  the  world  and 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  145 

its  mysteries  is  pressed  on  them.  At  home,  if 
any  religious  teaching  at  all  is  given,  it  is  too 
often  of  the  archaic  sort  which  I  have  been 
describing.  It  is  the  impossible  and  unworthy 
religion  of  the  interfering  God. 

Is  it  because  we  have  not  time  ?  Is  it  be- 
cause we  have  not  wit?  Or  is  it  not  rather 
because,  to  part  with  the  great  patient,  partial 
Companion  of  our  own  youth  is  so  cruelly 
hard  to  us  ourselves  ?  I  think  this  is  often  the 
chief  cause  of  our  faithless  failure  to  re-state 
fully  religious  things  to  our  children,  or  at 
least  make  the  best  attempt  we  can  to  do  so. 
But  oh,  my  friends,  in  this  matter  we  must 
not  weakly  sentimentalize.  Our  children  are 
born  into  an  age,  truth-seeking,  truth-honor- 
ing. The  Son  of  man,  whose  last  appeal  rang 
forth,  "  To  this  end  was  I  bom,  and  for  this 
cause  came  I  into  the  world,  that  I  should 
bear  witness  unto  the  truth.  Every  one  that  is 
of  the  truth  heareth  my  voice,"  can  lead  and 
inspire,  as  none  other  has  or  can,  such  an  age, 
and  as  the  supreme  witness  to  the  truth  and 
martyr  for  the  truth,  we  must  present  him  to 


146  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

the  young  of  our  age.  Let  us  do  this,  and 
they  may  be  trusted  to  make  their  way  to 
Jesus,  and  that  Jesus  who  has  led  their  fathers 
will  surely  lead  them. 

I  am  old  enough  to  remember  Professor 
W.  K.  Clifford's  exceeding  bitter  cry  after  the 
lost  "companion  God"  of  his  youth.  "We 
have  seen  the  spring  sun  shine  out  of  an  empty 
heaven,  to  light  up  a  soulless  earth.  We  have 
felt  with  utter  loneliness  that  the  great  Com- 
panion is  dead."  Clifford  had  been  taught  to 
worship  the  partial,  the  outside,  the  interfer- 
ing, the  supernaturally  working  God.  The 
spirit  of  his  time  seized  on  him.  He  must  go 
forth  among  the  searchers,  the  discoverers  of 
his  generation.  At  any  cost  he  must  seek  the 
truth ;  and  so  bravely  he  went.  And  the  spirit 
of  new  discovery  seized  on  him,  as  it  did  on 
the  choice  youth  of  fifty  years  ago.  Men 
called  it  the  scientific  spirit.  It  seized  on  Clif- 
ford, as  in  other  times  it  had  seized  on  John 
Huss,  Columbus,  Michael  Angelo,  or  Sir 
Francis  Drake,  inspiring  them  to  strange  and 
epoch-making  adventure. 


THE   RELIGION  OF  JESUS  147 

Ah,  we  may  go  much  farther  back  in  our 
old  world's  story,  and  still  we  shall  find  men 
breaking  away  from  the  dream  God  of  their 
youth,  sometimes  seemingly  to  lose  him  for- 
ever, and  sometimes  to  find  a  larger,  juster, 
lovelier  God.  Our  dreams  have  beautiful 
things  in  them,  and  because  they  are  dreams, 
there  mingle  with  the  beautiful  distorted  and 
impossible  things  as  well.  Now,  two  things 
have  combined  to  destroy  the  dream  God  of 
our  youth.  First,  the  growth  of  our  moral 
consciousness.  Our  concepts  of  justice  be- 
tween man  and  man  have  changed,  have  risen. 
Our  sense  of  responsibility  for  men  less  for- 
tunate than  ourselves  has  risen.  We  are  on 
the  side  of  the  weak.  We  would  if  we  could 
apportion  life's  burdens  to  the  shoulders  that 
must  bear  them.  The  obvious  inequalities  of 
life  startle  us.  The  unfairness  of  its  divisions 
fills  us  with  reforming,  interfering  zeal.  iVa- 
ture  is  abominably  partial.  She  pets  and 
spoils  some  of  her  children,  while  she  starves 
and  stunts  others.  We  see  these  things  clearly, 
and  more  than  that,  we  feel  them  keenly.  In- 


148  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

stinctively  we  recognize  in  these  cruelly  un- 
equal conditions  a  state  of  things  we  are  im- 
pelled by  all  that  is  highest  and  worthiest 
within  us  to  change,  or,  so  far  as  we  can, 
remove  altogether. 

To  the  man  who  tries  to  find  and  follow 
the  truth  to-day,  this  is  the  task  confronting 
him.  A  great  task!  A  long  task!  But  he 
believes  not  an  impossible  one.  It  is  all  that 
and  more.  It  is  a  new  task.  It  is  the  task 
of  the  new  creature  —  the  Christian  demo- 
crat. 

It  is  not  so  long  since  good  men,  who 
bravely  and  successfully  faced  their  own 
tasks,  set  for  themselves  a  very  different  aim. 
They  recognized  that  they  were  God's  chosen 
—  nature's  (but  they  would  not  use  that  word) 
fortunate  ones;  the  Elect,  in  short.  They 
were  anxious  to  maintain  their  superior  posi- 
tion before  all  other  things.  They  were  what 
they  were  by  the  choice  and  blessing  of  a 
favoring  God.  Their  prosperity  on  earth  was 
a  sign  of  divine  approval.  Their  own  future 
happiness  in  heaven   was  the  one  first  and 


THE  KELIGION   OF  JESUS  149 

chief  object  of  their  search  and  prayer.  So 
far  are  we  removed  from  them,  so  greatly 
does  our  moral  consciousness  revolt  from 
their  standards  of  duty,  that  we  find  it  hard 
at  times  to  believe  that  they  tried,  as  we  are 
trying,  to  follow  the  example  of  our  Saviour 
Christ,  and  be  made  like  unto  him.  Our  moral 
consciousness  forbids  us  to  entertain  their 
idea  of  God. 

Secondly,  the  partial,  the  outside,  the  in- 
terfering God  must  go  before  man's  widening, 
deepening  understanding  of  the  universe  in 
which  he  finds  himself ;  of  which  he  is  a  part, 
a  product ;  not  something  planted  in  it,  but 
something  springing  out  of  it,  justifying  and 
explaining  it  all.  In  great  and  small,  in  high 
and  low,  in  far  past  as  well  as  in  vital  present, 
in  all  the  universe,  everywhere  and  always,  is 
seen  the  unfailing  working  of  law  and  order. 
Chance  and  caprice  are  shut  out.  An  inter- 
fering and  partial  God  is  unknown.  I  have 
searched  many  books  to  find  a  definition  of 
our  order  of  law  that  is  at  the  same  time  suc- 
cinct and   understandable  by  ordinary  men. 


150  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

The  best  I  can  find  is  in  the  writings  of  a 
great  Jewish  philosopher,  Spinoza  :  — 

The  providence  of  God  is  just  the  stable  order 
of  the  universe,  in  which  reason  can  find  itself  more 
and  more  at  home,  and  fashion  out  of  its  materials 
new  instruments  for  progress  and  happiness.  All 
God's  laws  are  inviolably  observed.  They  partake 
of  the  nature  of  God  himself.  Being  in  fact  his 
nature  revealed,  they  are  therefore  characterized 
by  eternal  necessity  and  truth.1 

Now  I  think  all  can  understand  this  great 
man's  statement  of  the  inviolability  of  law, 
and  I  think  most  will  admit  its  truth,  and 
if  it  is  true,  then  you  can  readily  understand 
what  the  supernatural  cannot  be.  The  super- 
natural cannot  be  a  breaking  of  those  very 
laws  by  which  Wisdom,  Power,  Love  Eternal 
expresses  itself.  I  may  not  understand  those 
laws.  I  may  misread  them.  I  may  not  dis- 
cover them,  and  so  may  make  many  and  sad 
mistakes ;  men  have  done  so  and  will  yet  do 
so  in  days  to  come.  But  if  there  is  a  God,  as 
St.  Paul  believed,  "  above  all  and  in  all,"  so 

1  Professor  Robert  A.  Duff,  Political  and  Ethical  Philo- 
sophy of  Spinoza,  p.  1G7. 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  151 

surely  then  are  his  laws  the  expression  of  a 
divine  wisdom,  power,  and  love,  and  so  surely 
must  they  be  inviolable.  To  doubt  that  is  to 
court  madness. 

In  the  full  meaning,  therefore,  of  the  term 
"  supernatural,"  using  it  as  it  should  and  must 
be  used,  neither  Jesus  nor  his  works  can  be 
supernatural.  We  may  not  be  able  to  explain 
him  —  we  are  not  able.  I  do  not  believe  that 
any  knowledge  we  have,  or  for  a  long  time 
hence  may  have,  of  men  or  of  matter,  will 
explain  Jesus.  But  this  is  not  to  proclaim  him 
a  supernatural,  as  one  outside  our  universe  of 
law.  Nay,  he  was  part  of  God's  "  eternal  order 
of  necessity  and  truth." 

Bearing  in  mind  what  I  have  said  about  the 
supernatural,  let  us  turn  to  the  person  of  the 
Master.  The  old  way  of  accounting  for  his 
person  and  birth,  the  way  by  which  we  have, 
most  of  us,  been  brought  up  to  account  for 
them,  the  way  commonly  called  "  orthodox," 
is  no  real  way  at  all.  Yet  it  is  the  way  at  least 
professed  to  be  believed  in  by  most  Christians. 
It  is  not  the  oldest  way.  It  is  the  way  of 


152  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

the  ages  after  Jesus,  not  of  the  times  of  Jesus. 
That  he  was  virgin  born,  without  earthly 
father,  and  not  as  are  other  men,  is  stated  in 
two  of  the  gospels;  and  these  are  not  the 
earliest  compilations.  The  oldest  gospel,  Mark, 
makes  no  reference  to  his  birth  at  all.  Luke 
traces  his  genealogy  to  Joseph.  Jesus  himself 
never  refers  to  his  birth.  The  apostles  never 
mention  it.  It  is  referred  to  in  no  apostolic 
epistle.  As  a  dogma  it  was  formally  grafted 
on  Christian  belief  at  the  Council  of  Nice, 
325  a.d. 

By  the  fourth  century  the  idea  of  the  vir- 
gin birth  had  become  the  custom  of  the  time. 
The  Christian  religion  had  made  great  pro- 
gress in  the  East.  Egypt  was  the  ancient  home 
of  such  beliefs.  The  East  accepted  such  a 
birth  as  an  almost  usual  thing.  The  great,  the 
divine,  were  so  born.  Thus  it  was  natural  to 
think  of  Jesus  as  born  of  a  virgin.  If  the  di- 
vine man,  the  supreme  saviour  was  to  outshine, 
out-rank  all  other  men,  he  too  must  be  virgin 
born.  So  in  quite  early  days,  myth  gathered 
round  the  Master,  good  men  again  brought  to 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  153 

the  best  they  knew,  the  best  they  had,  and  in 
time  the  anathema  of  the  Church  was  stamped 
on  all  who  denied  what  neither  Jesus  nor  his 
apostles  knew  anything  about. 

To  us,  who  are  not  quite  so  densely  ignor- 
ant of  biological  matters  as  were  the  men  of 
those  times,  it  is  of  course  evident  that  the 
theory  they  held  to  could  not  yield  them  what 
they  sought.  By  eliminating  an  earthly  father, 
those  good  men  would  fain  free  their  Lord's 
nature  from  all  mundane  stain,  from  all  taint 
of  human  sin  and  error.  After  the  ignorance 
of  the  time,  they  believed  that  the  positive 
quality,  the  determining  factor,  in  human  gen- 
eration was  the  male ;  the  mother  was  merely 
a  passive  agent.  This  belief  was  natural  in  an 
age  that  gave  to  women  so  lowly  a  place,  but 
it  was  inaccurate.  They  were  seeking  to  do 
him  honor  for  whose  sake  they  were  prepared 
to  die,  and  they  did  it  in  the  only  way  they 
knew.  It  was  all  most  natural,  but  we  can 
honor  Jesus  without  copying  their  error  or 
accepting  their  impossible  theories  of  biology. 

The  pot-makers  are  at  work  again.  Beauti- 


154  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

ful  garments  to  adorn  the  son  of  Mary  must 
be  woven,  another  treasury  built  to  retain  and 
protect  the  living  seed  of  his  body.  Let  us 
thankfully  accept  the  precious  heritage  they 
pass  down  to  us.  Let  us  claim  the  Saviour, 
while  reverently  we  lay  aside  as  outworn  and 
no  longer  necessary  the  very  old  and  beauti- 
ful myth  that  shadows  his  cradle.  It  is  unde- 
niably beautiful,  but  even  so  it  would  rob  us 
of  what  is  most  precious  in  our  Lord.  There 
is  another  picture  of  that  cradle.  An  older 
picture  and  one  at  least  as  beautiful.  The  in- 
spired unknown  who  wrote  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews  gives  it  to  us,  and  it  runs :  "  Where- 
fore in  all  things  it  behoved  him  to  be  made 
like  unto  his  brethren." 1  One  like  us  in  all 
things,  one  of  us  he  declared  himself  to  be, 
and  no  mistaken  adulation  of  his  person  must 
rob  us  of  his  human  reality.  Unless  Jesus  ivas 
a  man  with  limited  knowledge,  with  human 
attributes  and  temptations,  his  life  can  be  for 
me  no  true  model,  his  death  no  comforting 
example  to  men.  If  he  came  into  our  world 

i  Heb.  ii,  17. 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  155 

as  no  other  man  came,  if  his  course  in  that 
world  was  marked  by  superhuman  power  over 
the  forces  of  nature  that  confront  and  oppress 
us,  then  the  text  I  have  placed  at  the  head  of 
this  lecture  is  a  misleading  delusion :  "  He 
that  believeth  on  me,  the  works  that  I  do 
shall  he  do  also;  and  greater  works  than 
these  shall  he  do;  because  I  go  unto  my 
Father:9 

To  multitudes  of  faithful  people  still  these 
old  theories  that  we  were  brought  up  on  pre- 
sent no  insurmountable  difficulties.  Let  such 
hold  to  them ;  only,  as  they  do  so,  let  them 
recognize  that  these  ancient  dogmas  as  to  the 
method  of  Jesus'  incarnation  are  not  of  the 
original  deposit,  but  are  the  growth  (the  nat- 
ural and  necessary  growth,  I  admit)  of  a 
later  time. 

Let  those,  on  the  other  hand,  who  reject 
time-worn  tradition  remember  that  no  theory 
of  Jesus'  person,  because  it  is  more  reasonable 
than  those  we  reject,  can  avail  to  make  any 
of  us  like  him.  To  be  like  him,  toe  must  fol- 
low and  obey  him,  for  only  in  obeying  shall 


156  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

we   learn    to    know   his   truth   or   share    his 
power. 

In  conclusion,  I  hear  some  say,  "If  the 
old  theories,  old  beliefs  have  worked  so  well, 
if  you  can  still  say  as  you  do,  i  Let  those  who 
believe  them  retain  them/  why  do  you  then 
come  here  disturbing  our  faith,  denying  and 
destroying  our  old  precious  beliefs  ?  " 

Let  me  try  and  tell  you  why.  There  are 
multitudes  to-day  of  honest  men  and  women 
who  have  been  uplifted  and  inspired  by  what 
is  best  in  the  truth-seeking,  truth-loving  spirit 
of  our  time.  Amid  the  immense  activities  of 
the  age,  the  bewildering  increase  of  knowledge, 
they  stand  confused.  New  duties  appeal  to 
them  in  throngs;  ancient  wrongs,  seeming  to 
them  dreadful,  call  for  reform  and  removal. 
Between  their  intensified  sense  of  truth,  their 
deepened  consciousness  of  duty,  they  are  over- 
whelmed. Such  people  need  a  strong,  sane, 
hopeful,  and  inspiring  leader,  and  such  is 
Jesus,  Never  did  any  age  need  his  leadership 
as  our  age  needs  it.  And  not  as  guide  only, 
but  as  old-fashioned  Saviour  we  need  him,  for 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  157 

sin,  in  new  and  beautifully  compelling  guise, 
waylays  us  still,  as  it  ever  has  the  sons  and 
daughters  of  men.  No  merely  scientific  spirit 
can  save  us,  or  can  take  with  us  the  place  of 
him  who  is  called  Jesus,  "for  he  shall  save  his 
people  from  their  sins." 

Now  orthodoxy  agrees  to  all  this,  and  ap- 
proves such  statements,  and  then  quickly  for- 
gets that  if  it  insist  on  making  the  guide  and 
Saviour  a  supernatural  and  half -human  being, 
then  he  can  no  longer  be  a  real  guide  or  a 
real  Saviour.  He  fades  away  from  us  into  the 
region  of  mirage  and  myth.  Orthodox  Christ- 
ianity does  actually  say,  "  I  am  Christianity. 
I  have  built  and  supported  these  churches. 
I  welcome  you  to  them.  I  offer  you  this  spirit- 
ual treasure  of  which  I  have  been  appointed 
the  guardian.  I  would  lead  you  to  the  Lord 
I  love  and  revere,  that  you  may  know  the 
comfort  of  his  Spirit,  the  power  and  peace  of 
his  salvation.  The  church  doors  are  open  to 
you.  My  hand  is  stretched  in  welcome.  In 
the  name  of  my  Lord,  I  invite  you,  but  — 
unless  you  agree  with  me  about  the  mystery 


158  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

of  his  nature,  before  birth,  at  birth,  and  after 
birth,  you  cannot  have  my  Lord  at  all."  Alas, 
I  am  not  exaggerating.  So  far  as  orthodoxy 
is  concerned,  the  echo  of  an  age-old  anathema 
is  in  the  air,  and  they  who  cannot  accept  the 
Son  of  the  virgin,  the  impossible  mythic  man ; 
they  to  whom  the  supernatural  is  impossible 
and  repellent,  may  not  have  Jesus  at  all. 

Jesus  said,  and  died  saying  that  every  one 
that  was  of  the  Truth  heard  his  voice ;  that 
every  one  that  sought  to  do  his  will,  had  a 
place  by  right  in  his  company.  Orthodoxy 
knows  better  than  the  Master  himself  what 
he  wanted,  and  so  imposes  on  his  would-be 
disciples  conditions  and  beliefs  he  not  only 
did  not  formulate,  but  knew  nothing  about. 
Human  nature  repeats  itself.  The  very  disci- 
ples, when  the  Master  was  not  by,  did  not 
hesitate  to  bar  good  men  from  him  because 
they  could  not  agree  with  those  men.  The 
disciples,  in  their  own  small,  prejudiced,  and 
narrow  way,  were  quite  ready  to  do  precisely 
what  the  Pharisees  had  done  in  the  large, 
more  authoritative  and  national  way,  namely, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  159 

bind  burdens  on  men's  shoulders  —  burdens 
of  custom,  tradition,  and  agreement  —  till  the 
very  state  of  affairs  Jesus  protested  against 
had  again  obtained,  and  good  men  had  made 
"the  word  of  God  of  none  effect  through 
their  tradition." 

I  have  been  out  in  the  world  of  to-day,  and 
I  know  whereof  I  speak.  I  have  looked  at  men 
outside  our  closely  drawn  sheepfold  lines,  and 
outside  those  lines  I  see  thousands  who  should 
be  inside.  These  outsiders  need,  and  feel  they 
need,  the  efficiency  of  organized  religious  life. 
They,  or  the  most  of  them,  recognize  the  need 
of  organization.  Without  it  nothing  can  be 
stable  in  our  human  affairs ;  because  of  it,  we 
have  Christianity.  Had  not  Christianity  been 
strongly  organized  in  the  form  of  a  Church, 
during  long,  ignorant,  and  doubtful  times, 
we  should  not  be  where  we  are,  or  know  or 
prize  what  we  have,  what  has  been  handed 
down  to  us. 

The  mode  of  the  Church's  government 
may  he  a  matter  of  expediency,  but  the  need 
of  the  Church's  firm  organization  is  a  matter 


1G0  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

of  prime  necessity.  If  any  Church  would 
stand,  it  must  effectively  organize  the  spirit- 
ual life  of  its  membership,  or  all  that  has  been 
gained  by  it  for  mankind  may  be  scattered 
and  lost  by  the  vagaries  and  eccentricities  of 
individual  feeling  and  action.  Multitudes  of 
good  men  outside  our  churches  realize  all  this, 
yet  they  are  still  outside.  If  they  need  the 
Church,  surely  the  Church  needs  them.  If 
they  need  shepherding,  she  needs  sheep.  They 
alone  can  save  her  from  dry  rot.  They  alone 
can  fill  her  depleted  and  undersized  ranks,  and 
make  her  efficient  in  her  holy  war.  They  are 
not  inside  because  they  cannot,  they  believe, 
honestly  profess  what  the  Church  calls  on  them 
to  profess.  They  profoundly  believe  they  can, 
for  the  present,  better  serve  the  truth-loving 
Son  of  man  by  refusing  to  say  about  him  and 
about  his  Church  what  they  cannot  believe  to 
be  true.  Mistake  it  not,  forget  it  not,  the  cru- 
sading ages  are  not  past  and  dead.  The  great- 
est crusade  that  faith,  hope,  and  charity  have 
ever  ventured  forth  on  is  but  beginning,  and 
only  one  man  can  lead  it  to  a  glorious  end. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  1G1 

The  mass  of  men  are  slaves  still  —  slaves  to 
their  passions,  to  their  condition,  to  their  pre- 
judices, to  their  poverty,  to  their  lot.  Mor- 
ally, socially,  economically,  mentally,  the  mul- 
titudes are  still  in  bondage,  but  a  brighter 
day  is  dawning,  and  a  spirit  of  larger  charity 
and  higher  resolve  is  moving  the  hearts  of 
men.  Oh,  that  the  old  Church  would  but  re- 
cognize the  fatefulness  of  the  hour  and  place 
herself  at  its  head.  The  crusade  is  her  crusade, 
the  old,  old  cause  of  mankind,  and  its  aim  is 
not  the  winning  of  Christ's  birthplace,  but 
the  freeing  of  his  sons. 


162  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 


JESUS'    DOCTRINE 


Never  man  spake  like  this  man.  — John  vu,  46. 

A  further  question  remains  to  be  answered. 
Where  did  Jesus  get  his  doctrine  ?  Have  the 
truths  he  save  to  men  their  sole  origin  in  him? 
Was  he  the  first  to  see  and  reveal  them  ?  Is 
he  a  teacher,  —  as  the  early  mystics  saw  him, 
—  "  without  spiritual  father  or  mother,  with- 
out descent,  having  neither  beginning  of  days 
nor  end  of  life,"  or  did  he  not  rather  find  the 
basis  of  what  he  gave  to  men,  and  often  more 
than  the  mere  basis,  in  the  continuous  revela- 
tion that  had  providentially  been  given  to  the 
Jew  from  the  very  beginning  of  his  national 
life?  Thus  to  put  the  question  is  to  answer 
it.  Jesus'  teachings,  as  they  are  recorded  for 
us,  are  on  this  point  explicit.  He  built  his  doc- 
trine on  the  past,  and  he  quoted  the  sacred 
writings  to  prove  the  righteousness  of  his  ap- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  1G3 

peal.  He  claimed  ever  to  fulfil,  not  to  destroy, 
the  best  beliefs  and  hopes  that  his  people  in- 
herited from  their  lawgivers  and  their  pro- 
phets. He  denounced  those  inevitable  pro- 
cesses by  which  the  truth  given  to  one  age 
had  been  muffled  up  and  distorted  by  the  next, 
but  ever  as  he  did  this,  he  appealed  to  the  ex- 
ample of  the  greatest  of  those  before  him — who 
had  been  obliged  to  make  the  very  same  pro- 
test. When  he  chooses  his  text,  —  challenged 
to  declare  himself  in  the  little  society  where 
he  had  been  brought  up,  —  it  is  taken  from 
that  great  teacher  who  long  before  had  cried, — 

"  The  Spirit  of  the  Lord  God  is  upon  me  ;  be- 
cause the  Lord  hath  anointed  me  to  preach  good 
tidings  unto  the  meek;  he  hath  sent  me  to  bind  up  the 
brokenhearted,  to  proclaim  liberty  to  the  captives, 
and  the  opening  of  the  prison  to  them  that  are  bound ; 
to  proclaim  the  acceptable  year  of  the  Lord."  x 

This  same  mighty  voice  it  was  that  had 
hurled  against  Jewish  formalism  the  tremen- 
dous accusation :  — 

"  To  what  purpose  is  the  multitude  of  your  sac- 
rifices unto  me  ?  saith  the  Lord :  I  am  full  of  the 

1  Is.  lxi,  1,  2. 


164  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

burnt  offerings  of  rams,  and  the  fat  of  fed  beasts ; 
and  I  delight  not  in  the  blood  of  bullocks,  or  of 
lambs,  or  of  he  goats.  .  .  .  Bring  no  more  vain 
oblations ;  incense  is  an  abomination  unto  me ;  the 
new  moons  and  sabbaths,  the  calling  of  assemblies, 
I  cannot  away  with.  .  .  .  Your  new  moons  and 
your  appointed  feasts  my  soul  hateth :  .  .  .  I  am 
weary  to  bear  them.  And  when  ye  spread  forth 
your  hands,  I  wiH  hide  mine  eyes  from  you:  yea, 
when  ye  make  many  prayers,  I  will  not  hear: 
your  hands  are  full  of  blood.  Wash  you,  make  you 
clean."  1 

No  one  can  read  such  passages  as  these  and 
not  recognize  in  them  the  very  spirit  of  the 
appeal  of  Jesus.  In  claiming  too,  as  he  did, 
the  right  to  push  aside  some  of  the  legislation 
which  the  nation  believed  had  Mosaic  sanc- 
tion, he  only  stood  where  the  great  prophets 
stood  before  him. 

In  his  teaching,  then,  so  far  as  he  can,  Jesus 
takes  his  texts  from  the  past.  He  finds  the 
living  seeds  still  growing  in  old  and  weed- 
choked  fields.  He  gathers  the  grain  of  God 
and  of  truth,  and  re-sows  it.  Let  me  particu- 
larize :  His  doctrine  of  life  for  man  beyond 
i  Is.  i,  11-16. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  165 

the  grave  was  no  new  doctrine  to  the  later 
Jews.  Most  of  them  held  to  it  stoutly,  though 
by  legal  subtleties  they  might  obscure  it. 
From  these,  then,  he  would  rescue  it,  retain- 
ing its  essential  part.  Jesus  had  a  new  and 
confident  hold  on  immortality  himself.  It 
meant  all  in  all  to  him,  and  then  as  he  sowed 
it,  it  became  a  new  and  beautiful  thing,  a  liv- 
ing seed,  an  inextinguishable  hope.  In  the 
dark  ages  that  were  soon  to  fall  upon  the 
world,  men  would  have  despaired  without  it. 
In  those  times  it  was  inevitable  that  the  doc- 
trine of  immortality  should  assume  the  crudi- 
ties that  belonged  to  the  times,  but  its  life- 
giving  power  was  never  lost. 

So  in  his  doctrine  of  Fatherhood :  the  God 
Jesus  worshipped  was  the  Father  of  his  child- 
ren. In  emphasizing  this  again  the  Master 
was  but  fulfilling  what  was  best  in  the  ancient 
belief.  Whether  he  believed  that  all  men  are 
the  children  of  God  does  not  seem  quite  clear. 
Certainly  St.  Paul  thought  that  he  was  justi- 
fied in  drawing  such  a  conclusion  from  his 
teaching,  for  he  based  his  appeal  to  the  cul- 


166  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

ture  of  Greece  on  a  fatherhood  that  is  univer- 
sal. 

What  is  of  immediate  importance  to  my  ar- 
gument, however,  is  that  the  doctrine  of  a 
divine  and  universal  fatherhood  had  long  be- 
fore been  proclaimed.  In  Isaiah  lxiii,  the 
prophet  who  has  been  retelling  the  story  of 
God's  patience  with  his  people,  claims  his 
fatherhood  for  others  who  were  not  Jews. 
"  Doubtless  thou  art  our  Father,  though  Abra- 
ham be  ignorant  of  us,  and  Israel  acknowledge 
us  not :  thou,  0  Lord,  art  our  Father,  our 
Redeemer;  thy  name  is  from  everlasting" 
(v.  16).  That  is  to  say,  thy  very  everlasting 
nature  is  fatherly. 

Finally,  to  take  but  one  more  instance  of 
many  in  which  Jesus  took  from  the  past  the 
germ  of  his  gospel  doctrine,  see  his  teaching 
of  a  coming  kingdom  of  heaven.  The  doctrine 
of  immortal  hope  developed  in  later  Judaism 
meant  more  than  a  personal  hope.  It  had  come 
to  mean  the  promise  of  a  higher,  holier  order 
of  living,  a  kingdom  of  heaven  on  earth. 

In  our  gospels,  Jesus'  teaching  of  the  king- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  167 

dom  is  somewhat  confusedly  set  forth.  Doubt- 
less much  that  he  said  in  regard  to  it  has  been 
lost,  and  much  more  retained  that  reflects  in 
its  final  expression  the  wishes  and  standards 
of  a  succeeding  age.  The  Apocalypse  furnishes 
a  striking  instance  of  how  soon  even  the  best 
men's  predictions  began  to  mould  and  change 
the  truths  Jesus  saw.  The  writer,  you  remem- 
ber, in  a  series  of  pictures  that  still  grip  our 
souls,  dwells  with  a  fierce  delight  on  the  over- 
whelming ruin  —  that  the  "  Lamb  "  metes  out 
to  those  who  deny  him  —  when  "the  great 
day  of  his  wrath  is  come."  *  "  And  I  saw  heaven 
opened,"  he  says,  "  and  behold  a  white  horse ; 
and  he  that  sat  upon  him  was  called  Faithful 
and  True,  and  in  righteousness  he  doth  judge 
and  make  war.  His  eyes  were  as  a  flame  of 
fire,  and  on  his  head  were  many  crowns.  .  .  . 
He  was  clothed  with  a  vesture  dipped  in  blood  : 
and  his  name  is  called  The  Word  of  God.  And 
the  armies  which  were  in  heaven  followed  him 
upon  white  horses,  clothed  in  fine  linen,  white 
and  clean.    And  out  of  his  mouth  goeth  a 

i  Rev.  vi,  17. 


1G8  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

sharp  sword,  that  with  it  he  should  smite 
the  nations;  and  he  shall  rule  them  with  a 
rod  of  iron :  and  he  treadeth  the  winepress 
of  the  fierceness  and  wrath  of  Almighty 
God."  l 

Literature  knows  nothing  more  sublime. 
The  inspired  writer's  passion  grips  our  souls, 
and  may  for  a  time  carry  us  away.  But  some- 
how we  feel  we  have  left  the  Jesus  we  knew 
far  behind  —  the  Jesus  of  Nazareth  who  was 
meek  and  lowly  in  heart,  who  went  about  do- 
ing good  and  healing  those  that  were  op- 
pressed of  the  devil.  This  view  of  the  Kingdom 
of  Heaven  is  surely  very  hard  to  reconcile  with 
much  he  taught.  A  kingdom  that  "  cometh 
not  with  observation,"  a  kingdom  that  was 
"within  men,"  even  within  his  persecutors. 
(It  was  to  the  Pharisees  he  said :  "  The  king- 
dom of  God  is  within  you."2)  The  Patmos 
doctrine  is  surely  a  glorious  harking  back  to 
the  older  Jewish  idea  of  the  reign  of  God. 
Still,  to  believe,  as  the  great  Jewish  teachers 
had  ever  done,  in  a  final  victory  of  God  and 
i  Rev.  xix,  11-15.  2  Luke  xvn,  20,  21. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  169 

good  at  all  was  most  certainly  a  triumph  o£ 
faith.  And  it  was  from  their  ancient  idea  of 
that  divine  kingdom  that  the  Master  evolved 
his  own  gentler  and  more  universal  doctrine. 
He  knew  what  was  in  man.  Had  not  the  best 
of  men  ever  and  always  craved  a  divine  King  ? 
What  were  all  earthly  kings  and  kingdoms,  all 
efforts  made  for  them,  all  sacrifices  endured 
for  them,  but  poor  transient  attempts  to  ex- 
press what  some  day  men  hoped  to  see  ?  And 
the  poor  sovereignty  of  the  merely  human 
king  remained  sacred  because  it  dimly  hinted 
at  a  sovereignty  far  transcending  itself.  The 
deep  want  of  the  human  heart  cries  out  for  a 
king.  It  is  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  that  I  crave. 
The  broken  lights  of  truth ;  the  mockeries  of 
half  knowledge;  the  spotted  and  stained  good- 
ness of  the  best  of  men,  —  these  cannot  sat- 
isfy me  :  I  want  God ! 

Humanity  in  the  mass,  the  positivist's  God, 
is  but  a  poor  divinity.  It  is  abhorrent  to  me 
to  think  of  man  or  any  multiple  of  man  as  the 
highest  thing  in  all  the  universe.  The  centre 
of  it  all  must  be  something  far  holier,  stronger, 


170  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

less  mutable  than  myself.  In  the  physical  order 
I  stand  alone  in  my  greatness  ;  yet  am  I  a 
thing  of  but  few  days,  holding  life  by  a  frail 
thread.  I  can  mould  the  plastic  masses  to  my 
will,  I  am  conscious  of  dominion ;  yet  in  my 
greatness  I  am  most  conscious  of  my  weakness 
and  my  loneliness.  I  want  a  lord  and  king.  I 
cannot  worship  myself,  or  any  multiple  of  my- 
self. The  longer  I  live,  the  surer  I  am  that  all 
men  are  alike  in  their  good  qualities  and  their 
bad.  The  great  mass  of  us  average  about  the 
same.  Some  rise  here  and  there  with  about 
their  heads  a  halo  of  some  great  goodness, 
some  great  virtue,  some  great  deed  done.  But 
if  you  watch  and  observe,  in  spite  of  all  the 
pitiful  untruth  and  subterfuge  of  human  bio- 
graphy, you  will  see  that  though  acclaims 
mount  to  dizziest  height,  and  humanity  cheers 
its  idol  to  the  point  of  self-induced  hysteria, 
though  the  halo-bound  head  be  of  gold,  the 
feet  that  support  it  are  of  clay.  The  inspired 
visionary  lacks  poise,  steadfast  purpose,  or 
some  other  necessary  quality  of  greatness. 
The   practical  man  who    accomplishes  great 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  171 

tasks  lias  no  head  of  gold,  nor  are  his  feet 
clay.  He  marches  to  his  goal  with  an  unfalter- 
ing stride;  but  then  those  purposeful,  practical 
feet  sometimes  crush  the  weaker  folk  that 
come  in  their  way.  We  need  the  marching 
great  men  as  much  as  the  men  of  sublime  vi- 
sion )  the  puller-down  of  strongholds,  as  much 
as  the  dreamer  of  fair  dreams.  The  moral 
qualities  one  lacks,  the  other  possesses.  But 
none  possess  both  or  all. 

My  soul  craves  something  higher,  completer 
than  these  —  for  it  is  athirst  for  God ;  for 
God  to  forgive  me,  to  cleanse  me,  to  decide 
for  me,  to  judge  me:  ah,  to  do  more !  —  to 
love  me,  to  love  the  things  in  me  that  were 
almost  ready  to  be  born,  but  never  saw  the 
light ;  songs  fit  to  be  sung,  but  never  put  to 
earthly  music ;  to  love  the  innate  good  in  me 
that  was  dwarfed  and  stunted.  My  soul  is 
athirst  for  God,  at  the  long  last  to  care  for 
me,  to  take  me  at  my  true  value,  and  to  take 
me  home.  Who  can  tell  them?  Who  describe 
them?  But  such  are  the  unquenchable  long- 
ings of  the  human  soul,  and  it  was  to  them 


172  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

Jesus  brought  his  gospel  of  salvation,  his  mes- 
sage of  hope. 

God's  fatherhood,  —  that  is,  a  God  who 
cares,  —  man's  hope  beyond  death,  and  the 
ultimate  victory  of  goodness  and  light  over 
sin :  this  was  the  threefold  gospel  of  Jesus. 
It  was  his  reply  to  what  men  craved  in  his  time, 
to  what  men  have  craved  in  all  times,  to  what 
we  hunger  for  to-day.  There  is  no  substitute 
for  that  gospel,  for  no  other  solace  has  been 
found  for  that  craving. 

I  have  tried,  very  briefly  and  imperfectly, 
then,  to  show  you  Jesus  as  a  teacher,  coming 
after  other  Jewish  teachers,  choosing  from 
their  store  the  best,  the  most  vital  messages  ; 
gathering  up  their  clearest  and  holiest  visions 
and  repeating  them  ;  rilling  them  with  his  own 
wonderful  spiritual  power,  offering  them  as 
new,  and  yet  as  old  gifts  to  men. 

But  Jesus  was  more  than  a  teacher.  He 
claimed  to  be  an  example  (and  that  is  a  claim 
none  ever  made  before),  an  example  and  an 
illustration  of  how  a  man  should  take  his  true 


THE   RELIGION  OF  JESUS  173 

and  divinely  appointed  place  in  the  order  of 
this  world,  a  world  wherein  was  much  sin  and 
suffering,  much  that  was  mysterious  and  baf- 
fling to  faith  —  if  men  were  to  believe  that  it 
was  created  and  maintained  by  a  God  who 
cared.  Jesus'  final  claim  on  man's  confidence 
and  belief  was  this,  that  he  offered  himself  as 
an  explanation  of  the  order  of  the  world. 
Living,  serving,  dying,  rising,  he  revealed 
God's  will  and  law  concerning  it. 

Such  was  the  unique  claim  of  the  unique 
man. 

Now,  as  was  altogether  natural,  this  claim 
must  first  be  so  presented  as  to  win  the  con- 
fidence of  his  own  people,  the  Jews.  "  I  am 
not  come,"  says  he,  "  but  to  the  lost  sheep  of 
the  house  of  Israel";  and  it  was  by  his  example 
and  in  obedience  to  his  command  that  the  first 
activities  of  the  early  Church  were  confined  to 
missionizing  in  Judea. 

As  I  have  pointed  out,  while  he  lived,  Jesus 
based  his  appeals  to  his  countrymen  on  the 
ancient  writings  both  he  and  they  venerated. 


174  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

And  after  he  died,  in  claiming  messiahship 
for  him,  his  followers  of  necessity  continued 
to  base  their  claim  on  the  same  sources  of  au- 
thority. Could  it  be  proved  to  them  from  holy 
writ  that  Jesus  was  the  Messiah  they  expected, 
then  their  acceptance  of  him  was  sure.  Fail- 
ing the  establishment  of  such  a  claim,  his  re- 
jection by  them  was  certain. 

If  it  must  be  admitted,  and  I  think  it  must 
be  admitted,  that  often  the  passages  quoted 
by  the  apostles  and  teachers,  a  report  of  whose 
arguments  have  been  preserved  for  us  in  the 
New  Testament,  will  not  bear  the  heavy  load  of 
proof  that  they  sought  to  impose  on  them,  the 
custom  of  the  time  must  be  remembered  in 
their  excuse.  They  but  handled  the  sacred 
writings  as  the  best  and  wisest  men  of  their 
day  handled  them.  Gloss  and  paraphrase  were 
then  the  rule.  They  could  only  do  as  they  had 
been  taught.  They  had  seen  a  great  light,  a 
light  falling  from  inmost  heaven  on  a  living 
man  and  on  an  ancient  law.  They  had  com- 
panied  with  Jesus,  and  had  not  their  "  hearts 
burned  within  them,"  as  he  who  spake  as  never 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  175 

man  spake,  "talked  with  them  by  the  way  and 
opened  to  them  the  scriptures  "  ? 

As  time  went  on,  and  a  larger  missionary 
field  opened  before  the  Church,  her  vision 
widened,  as  Jesus  had  promised  it  should.  Im- 
pelled by  the  spirit,  Jewish  Christianity  be- 
came too  great,  too  universal  a  thing  to  remain 
the  possession  of  a  tribe.  Peter's  momentous 
decision  in  the  matter  of  the  proselyte  Cor- 
nelius first  led  to  the  change.  The  Temple's 
door  had  ever  been  shut  to  the  outside  world, 
but  now  a  few  men  began  to  dream  of  a  tem- 
ple not  "made  with  hands,"  of  worshippers 
who  bowed  in  spirit  and  in  truth  before,  not 
a  golden,  but  an  invisible  altar. 

Then  rose  great  Paul,  a  Hebrew  of  the  He- 
brews, yet  deeply  touched  with  the  vision  of 
the  wider  world;  more  fully  convinced  of  the 
universal  mission  of  Jesus  than  were  any  of 
that  early  band;  and  with  Paul — as  I  have 
already  said  —  there  came  a  momentous  en- 
largement of  Christian  doctrine.  Paul  spoke 
and  wrote  for  a  wider  than  a  Jewish  audience. 
It  was  necessary  for  him,  therefore,  to  make 


176  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

an  appeal  to  authorities  other  than  those  the 
Jews  revered.  His  manner  of  quotation  from 
the  sacred  Scriptures  is  the  manner  of  his  time. 
His  proof  texts  do  not  always  prove ;  but  apart 
from  the  method  of  the  rabbinical  school  in 
which  he  was  trained,  and  which  left  its  per- 
manent mark  on  him,  Paul  has  the  grip  of  a 
master  on  the  sacred  literature  of  his  people, 
and  a  profoundly  sympathetic  understander 
of  the  wider  world  he  set  himself  to  win. 

Just  now  I  spoke  of  three  great  doctrines 
drawn  by  Jesus  from  the  past  —  restated  and 
enlarged  by  him,  and  given  forth  as  living  seed 
to  men  !  God's  fatherhood  —  that  is,  a  God 
who  cares;  man's  hope  beyond  death,  Christ- 
ian immortality;  and  the  ultimate  victory  of 
goodness  and  light  over  sin  —  that  is,  the  cer- 
tainty of  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven.  To  these 
Paul  added  his  philosophy  of  the  Master's  per- 
son and  sacrifice.  By  its  means  he  would  ex- 
plain them  all. 

To  attempt  even  an  outline  of  Paul's  philo- 
sophy would  be  out  of  place  here.  Yet  on 
one  aspect  of  it  I  must  dwell  for  a  little,  for 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  177 

it  has  become  part  of  our  belief.  I  refer  to  his 
theory  of  the  sacrificial  value  of  the  life  and 
death  of  Jesus.  This  is  really  of  first  import- 
ance, because  it  was  the  earliest  effort  made 
by  the  Christian  mind  to  bind  together  the 
sacrificial  ideas  of  the  Jewish  past  and  the 
Christian  present.  Such  an  effort  was  inevita- 
ble, for  Jesus  himself  had  rendered  it  inevita- 
ble when  he  declared  that  his  life  was  the  ful- 
filling of  the  divine  law,  and  that  law  from 
beginning  to  end  was  sacrificial. 

Let  it  be  at  once  admitted  that  Paul's  theory 
of  the  sacrificial  value  of  the  life  and  death  of 
Jesus  in  many  ways  satisfies  us  no  longer. 
The  ancient  illustrations  of  the  law  of  sacri- 
fice, the  steaming  altar,  the  transferred  guilt, 
the  atoning  blood,  the  mediating  priest  are 
figures  of  a  remote  and  barbaric  time.  They 
served  well  the  purpose  of  the  time  that  pro- 
duced and  ennobled  them.  They  helped  men 
then  to  pray  and  to  believe.  They  represented 
as  high  an  ideal  of  God  as  men  could  accept, 
but  to  insist  on  them  now  would  but  push 
men  towards  prayerlessness  and  despair. 


178  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

Apart  from  these  temporal  and  local  limita- 
tions of  the  mind,  Paul  had  a  vision  of  the 
meaning  of  the  life  and  death  of  Jesus  which 
had  and  has  a  vital  relation  to  all  life  and  to 
every  age,  which  must  survive  all  the  tempor- 
ary forms  in  which  reverence  clothes  it,  must 
outlast  all  sacred  repositories  provided  for  its 
safe-keeping.  He  believed  that  the  sacrifice  of 
Jesus  is  the  illustration  of  the  one  finally  true 
law  of  human  life  in  this  our  world ;  that  in 
Jesus  the  beauty  and  the  reasonableness  of 
the  sacrificial  life  are  revealed ;  that  in  this  sense 
—  and  it  is  the  highest  and  final  sense  —  all 
priests  and  temples  and  altars  are  but  shad- 
ows and  pictures  of  that  real  sacrifice  which  is 
the  sacrifice  of  the  life  of  man.  I  will  quote 
a  passage  written  towards  the  close  of  his  life 
which  embodies  the  Pauline  philosophy  —  and 
is  indeed  a  comprehensive  statement  of  what 
the  life,  death,  and  resurrection  of  Jesus  came 
to  mean  to  him  :  — 

"  Not  looking  each  of  you  to  his  own  things,  but 
each  of  you  also  to  the  things  of  others.  Have  this 
mind  in  you,  which  was  also  in  Christ  Jesus :  who, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  179 

being  in  the  form  of  God,  counted  it  not  a  prize 
to  be  on  an  equality  with  God,  but  emptied  him- 
self, taking  the  form  of  a  servant,  being  made  in 
the  likeness  of  men  ;  and  being  found  in  fashion  as 
a  man,  he  humbled  himself,  becoming  obedient  even 
unto  death,  yea,  the  death  of  the  cross.  Wherefore 
also  God  highly  exalted  him,  and  gave  unto  him 
the  name  which  is  above  every  name ;  that  in  the 
name  of  Jesus  every  knee  should  bow,  of  things  in 
heaven  and  things  on  earth  and  things  under  the 
earth,  and  that  every  tongue  should  confess  that 
Jesus  Christ  is  Lord,  to  the  glory  of  God  the 
Father." » 

In  these  verses  St.  Paul's  meaning  at  least 
is  unmistakable.  They  sum  up,  too,  much  of 
his  maturer  teaching.  The  question  which  some 
of  us  are  in  doubt  about  to-day  is,  Is  it  pos- 
sible to  accept  a  rule  of  life  so  difficult,  so  sim- 
ple? Surrounded  as  we  are  by  temptations, 
conscious  as  we  are  of  a  pitiful  mixture  of 
motive,  is  it  possible  for  us  in  any  real  sense 
to  yield  practical  obedience  to  these  most 
searching  and  comprehensive  commands?  Look 
steadily,  says  the  apostle,  with  purposefulness, 
with  honest  intention,  not  on  your  own  affairs 
*  Phil,  ii,  4-ll,  R.  V. 


180  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

only,  but  on  the  things  of  others.  Look 
as  you  would  look  when  pursuing  your  own 
interests,  wisely,  bravely;  not  merely  as  you 
study  a  problem,  but  as  you  plan  an  enterprise. 
Look  on  the  things  of  others,  and,  as  you  look, 
let  Christ's  very  mind  be  yours ;  look  as  he 
looked.  The  prize  of  life  he  could  have  grasped ; 
he  sought  it  not  for  himself.  All  the  powers 
of  an  extraordinary  manhood  were  his ;  he 
stripped  himself  of  them  and  voluntarily  fore- 
went his  own  legitimate  advantage.  He  stooped 
to  weakness  when  he  need  not  have  stooped. 
He  was  willing  to  die,  and  met  death  in  its 
most  awful  shape ;  turning  to  death,  agony, 
and  defeat;  choosing  these  deliberately  as  his 
portion  sooner  than  give  up  his  high  purpose 
of  saving  his  fellow  men.  His  deliberate  mode 
of  action,  ruling  all  his  life  and  finally  con- 
summated by  his  death,  Paul  declares  God  ac- 
cepts and  crowns,  and,  so  accepting  and  crown- 
ing it,  declares  it  to  be  the  one  supreme,  final, 
permanent,  and  victorious  form  of  life  for- 
ever. This  indisputably  is  St.  Paul's  meaning. 
This  is  Christianity,  and  the  mind  of  Christ 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  181 

as  he  understood  it,  preached  it,  and   died 
for  it. 

Is  this  mind  of  Christ  possible  to  us  to-day  ? 
There  is  very  much  in  the  everyday  life  of  us 
all  which  seems,  at  a  superficial  glance,  to 
deny  the  practicability  of  living  after  this  high 
standard.  We  need  the  stimulus  of  competi- 
tion. This  is  not  lacking  even  in  our  college 
days.  You  are  feeling  what  you  believe  to  be 
its  legitimate  influence  now.  You  are  gather- 
ing the  results,  in  these  last  few  crowded,  ex- 
citing weeks  of  your  university  life,  of  a  series 
of  competitions,  in  which  you  have  engaged 
during  all  the  course  of  it;  and  you  feel  that 
in  the  stimulus  of  reasonable  competition  there 
is  real  good.  Yet  if  you  look  at  this  college 
life  of  yours  at  all  searchingly,  you  are  soon 
aware  that  competition  forms  a  very  small  part 
of  its  life.  Its  main  value  lies  far  away  from 
mere  advantages  of  competition.  Its  chief 
gains  are  not  to  be  won  in  any  game  of  grab. 
Rather  it  is  in  coming  to  understand  your  own 
life,  winning  invaluable  opportunities  to  study 
men  of  like  purposes  and  yet  different  capaci- 


182  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

ties  from  your  own,  and  in  the  leisurely  asso- 
ciating with  so  much  that  is  best  and  stimu- 
lating in  American  life  and  scholarship,  that 
the  main  good  of  it  all  lies.  And  as  from  over 
the  college  walls,  in  an  occasional  thoughtful 
hour,  you  look  towards  the  future,  you  have 
felt  again  that  competition  as  a  rule  of  life 
with  one's  fellow  is,  after  all,  a  semi-barbarous 
law,  and  that  it  bears  to  the  generous  spirit 
pretty  much  the  same  relation  that  the  sting- 
ing spur  does  to  the  thoroughbred's  flank. 
By  itself,  it  never  won  a  great  race  yet.  The 
best  blood  scarcely  acknowledges  it. 

Thus,  as  we  look  within  and  then  without, 
we  are  gradually  aware  that  in  a  strange  and 
wonderful  way  the  ideal  of  self-sacrificing  serv- 
ice is  growing  on  men.  When  sometimes,  dis- 
heartened and  downcast,  we  seem  to  see  in  life 
just  the  same  sordidness  and  cruelty  that  used 
to  rule  it  long  ago,  we  are  aware  that  such  a 
state  of  mind  is  more  or  less  colored  by  pass- 
ing mood  or  feeling,  and  is  not  borne  out  by 
fact.  The  studies  of  these  past  years  ought  to 
have    done  something    to  convince  you  that 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  183 

there  is  a  tide  in  the  affairs  of  men,  a  tide  of 
pity,  an  earnest,  self-sacrificing  interest,  that 
flows  and  ebbs  not.  More  thoughtfully,  more 
considerately,  man  looks  on  the  life  of  his  fel- 
low. Our  forefathers  played  the  game  of  grab 
so  remorselessly,  we  ourselves  are  so  often 
keenly  set  at  it,  that  a  life  without  strife,  an 
existence  in  which  competition  in  a  thousand 
forms  and  shapes  does  not  play  a  prominent 
part,  is  hard,  nay,  almost  impossible  for  us  to 
conceive.  We  are  so  wedded  to  ideas  of  con- 
tention and  competition  that  any  other  condi- 
tions than  those  springing  from  these  are  well- 
nigh  inconceivable  to  us. 

And  yet  his  life  is  poor  and  narrow,  indeed, 
who  has  not  been  blest  by  some  vision  of  an 
existence  in  which  love  casts  out  strife ;  some 
limited  sphere  of  life,  at  least,  in  which  com- 
petition and  strife  are  not.  It  is  possible  for 
even  a  very  imperfect  character  to  love  some 
one  with  such  a  love  that  into  his  relations  with 
that  person  competition  and  strife  cannot  enter. 
For  this  loved  one  we  forego  our  own  ad  vantage 
with  delight.  For  the  sake  of  such,  to  suffer  is 


184  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

as  natural  a  thing  as  to  breathe.  Further  than 
this,  if  we  look  around  us  thoughtfully,  we 
must  be  aware  that  man's  sphere  of  love  is 
ever  widening;  that  widening  interests  bring 
men  more  and  more  together.  Warmer  ties  are 
gaining  strength  surely,  if  slowly.  Man  is  no 
longer  cut  off  from  man  as  he  used  to  be.  Life 
overlaps  life.  The  hard,  high  walls  of  prejudice 
and  caste,  of  difference  in  fortune,  and  even 
in  nationhood,  no  longer  serve  to  separate 
men  altogether  from  each  other,  as  they  used 
to  do. 

Look  backward  for  the  space  of  a  few  gen- 
erations only,  and  you  see  the  best  men,  the 
wisest,  the  most  cultivated,  incomprehensibly 
callous  to  the  wants  and  woes  of  those  near 
them,  untouched  by  the  feeling  of  their  infirm- 
ity, unmoved  by  their  bitterest  cry.  Some  two 
years  ago,  I  happened  to  spend  two  weeks  of 
spring  weather  in  the  ancient  city  of  Nurem- 
berg. There,  little  changed  by  our  modern 
life,  stands  that  wonderful  city.  In  its  courts 
and  palaces,  in  its  narrow  streets  and  splendid 
churches,  the  very  spirit  of  medievalism  seems 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  185 

to  have  found  its  last  retreat.  There  is  scarcely 
a  finer  hall  in  Europe  than  that  splendid  coun- 
cil chamber  in  which  Nuremberg's  great  citi- 
zens, successful  merchants,  and  valiant  cap- 
tains took  counsel  for  peace  and  for  war. 
Around  that  banqueting-hall,  blazoned  on  its 
walls,  is  the  tale  of  Nuremberg's  greatness. 
There  the  great  fresco  speaks  of  her  past  life 
and  glory,  her  wealth,  her  power,  her  inde- 
pendence, her  artistic  genius.  And  in  the  most 
natural  way,  mingled  with  this  record,  is  the 
story  of  her  unconscious  cruelty,  too.  The  tale 
of  tortured  criminal  stands  written  on  the  wall 
as  plainly  as  the  glory  of  the  lordly  merchant. 
With  equal  truth  they  are  drawn  side  by  side. 
As  you  stand  in  the  hall,  the  golden  light  fall- 
ing through  wide  windows,  rich  in  glass,  it 
is  easy  to  think  yourself  back  in  the  time  when 
what,  was  richest,  wisest,  fairest,  bravest,  and 
best  in  that  central  city  of  Europe  met  and 
feasted  where  now  you  stand.  But  what  an- 
other story  is  hidden  beneath  the  great  stone 
floor!  Go  down  a  few  feet,  and  there,  for  your 
inspection,  open  up  whole  rows  of  cells.  Oh, 


186  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

such  cells!  Noisome,  dank,  impenetrated  by 
a  single  sun-ray.  There  in  darkness,  utter  and 
profound,  men,  and  women,  too,  were  impris- 
oned, tortured,  put  to  death;  while  a  foot  above 
their  heads,  the  solid  stone  shutting  out  all 
sound  of  revelry  from  above  or  of  wail  from 
below,  the  great  citizens  feasted  and  drank, 
planned  wars  and  discussed  commerce. 

Could  such  things  be  to-day?  We  smile  at 
the  idea ;  it  is  an  insult  to  imagine  it  possible. 
And  yet  those  men  and  women  that  feasted 
were  not  specially  bad  men  and  women ;  nor 
did  those  poor  wretches  who  suffered  beneath 
own  often  to  any  worse  sin  than  misfortune. 
Why  has  the  former  state  of  things  passed 
away  ?  I  tell  you,  brothers,  there  is  but  one 
reason  —  it  is  the  advance  of  the  tide  of  "  the 
mind  of  Christ."  Year  by  year,  it  seemed,  to 
those  who  watched  it,  to  ebb  as  often  as  to 
flow.  Slowly,  very  slowly,  it  rose  on  the  sands, 
and  as  each  watcher  failed  at  his  post,  his  tes- 
timony as  to  its  rising  was  all  too  uncertain  to 
assure  him  who  took  his  place.  But  there  was 
no  ebb  for  all  that. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  187 

For  while  the  tired  waves,  vainly  breaking, 
Seem  here  no  painful  inch  to  gain, 

Far  back,  through  creeks  and  inlets  making, 
Comes  silent,  flooding  in,  the  main. 

And  not  by  eastern  windows  only, 

When  daylight  comes,  comes  in  the  light ; 

In  front,  the  sun  climbs  slow  —  how  slowly  ! 
But  westward,  look,  the  land  is  bright. 

It  is  rising  still.  I  tell  you  the  time  will  come 
— I  believe  it  is  near  at  hand  —  when  it  will 
be  impossible  for  men  and  women  to  live, 
as  even  now  they  are  living,  in  the  broad  and 
beautiful  houses  of  our  great  cities,  surround- 
ing themselves  there  with  all  the  rich  gifts  and 
bounty  of  life,  while  close  to  them  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  their  fellow  citizens  are  shut 
down  within  the  pestiferous  narrowness  of  the 
tenement-house  or  the  sweat-shop.  It  will  be  as 
impossible  for  things  which  exist  to-day  to  con- 
tinue to  exist  side  by  side  in  our  cities  and 
land  as  it  would  be  to  fill  Nuremberg's  broad 
hall  in  this  twentieth  century  with  feasting  cit- 
izens, while  her  dungeons  beneath  were  choked 
with  the  victims  of  her  torture.  Yes,  love  is 
casting  out  strife,  is  taking  the  bitterness  out 


188  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

of  competition.  Love  recognizes  to-day,  as  she 
never  did  before,  misfortune  as  establishing  a 
claim  on  fortune,  and  sorrow  and  suffering  as 
pleas  from  which  an  honorable  man  must  never 
turn  away,  if  he  would  hope  for  the  favor,  not 
only  of  a  merciful  God,  but  of  his  own  justi- 
fying conscience. 

Again  I  ask,  Why  is  this?  It  is  because  the 
mind  of  Christ  is  increasingly  becoming  a 
power  among  men.  But  as  I  seek  to  set  before 
you  the  reasonableness  and  certainty  and  com- 
ing prevalence  of  this  mind  of  Christ,  I  shall 
perhaps  be  accused  of  sentimentalism.  The 
plea  I  make,  you  say,  is  sentimental.  Is  it  so  ? 
I  would  have  you  remember  that  it  is  not  the 
voice  of  religion  alone  that  calls  you  to-day  to 
make  the  mind  of  Christ  a  power  in  your  own 
lives  and  in  the  world.  What  science  to-day, 
in  the  interest  she  excites,  and  in  the  splendid 
triumphs  she  has  won,  takes  more  prominent 
place  than  does  physiology  in  all  her  branches  ? 
We  might  call  her  the  regnant  science  to-day. 
It  requires  little  more  than  a  knowledge  of 
first  principles  of  physiology  to  assure  our- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  189 

selves  that  this  youngest  of  all  the  sciences 
calls  on  those  who  follow  her  deliberately  to 
accept  self-sacrifice  as  their  law.  Somewhat 
heady  with  her  own  intoxicating  success,  she 
stands  before  the  world  to-day.  "  Listen  to 
me,"  she  seems  to  say ;  "  let  me  speak.  I  may 
be  the  youngest  in  the  class,  but  I  have  some- 
thing important  to  say."  And  when  she  does 
tell  of  her  own  things,  with  a  captivating 
vigor  of  youth  and  enthusiasm  cast  around 
her,  what  is  the  burden  of  her  testimony  ?  In- 
voluntary  sacrifice  in  the  lowest  orders  of 
life — voluntary  sacrifice  in  the  highest  forms 
of  life.  This  is  her  testimony,  her  message, 
her  gospel.  In  these  highest  she  calls  it  altruism. 
It  is  really  "the  mind  of  Christ."  "You," 
she  cries  to  those  who  listen  to  her  —  "  you 
are  the  result  of  age-long  processes  of  sacri- 
fice ;  fall  in  with  the  law  that  made  you  what 
you  are.  Let  this  mind  be  in  you  :  forego  your 
own  advantage,  and,  doing  so,  win  your  high- 
est life." 

Or  listen  with  me  for  a  moment  to  another 
voice  of  weight,  that  in  no  special  sense  claims 


190  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

to  be  religious.  Listen  to  the  voice  of  history. 
This  teacher,  too,  has  the  confidence  of  youth, 
of  youth  renewed  at  least.  She  tells  us  that 
we  are  only  beginning  to  understand  how  to 
place  together  in  their  proper  order  and  se- 
quence the  lessons  of  the  past.  "  In  physics," 
she  cries,  "you  have  fixed  laws,  laws  by  which 
you  can  judge  certainly  of  nature's  sequences. 
By  these  the  tides  rise  and  fall,  the  winds  come 
and  go,  light  follows  darkness,  and  the  glory 
of  the  spring  the  rigor  of  the  winter.  To  the 
aid  of  these  and  the  conduct  of  them  the  will 
of  man  is  not  necessary.  Seed-time  and  har- 
vest, day  and  night,  snow  and  heat,  summer 
and  winter,  shall  not  fail."  But  in  the  con- 
duct of  his  own  affairs,  it  is  vitally  necessary 
that  man  take  into  his  consideration  the  prop- 
erty and  responsibility  of  his  own  will.  Na- 
ture mates  herself  to  that  will.  She  aids  man 
so  long  as  he  struggles.  She  is  to  him  a  sturdy 
helpmeet.  She  will  not  live  with  him,  however, 
as  a  sloven.  She  will  marry  him,  but  not  slave 
for  him.  If  he  neglect  her,  she  withdraws  her 
forces,  her  vital  warmth  from  him.    Whether 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  191 

it  is  an  individual  or  a  generation  of  individ- 
uals, this  is  true  of  man's  relations  to  her.  She 
will  give  man  no  assurance  of  faithfulness  on 
her  part,  and  permanent  support  springing 
from  that  faithfulness,  if  he  continue  faith- 
less to  her.  She  will  help  her  mate,  man,  to 
prepare  for  each  generation  a  more  favorable 
environment  in  some  respects  than  the  pre- 
vious generation  had.  Intellectually,  morally, 
the  atmosphere,  the  environment  may  be  more 
favorable.  But  let  that  generation,  thus  kindly 
greeted  and  provided  for  by  nature,  fail  of  its 
duty,  cease  to  do  its  part,  be  lacking  in  some 
essential  requirement,  and  the  higher  platform 
to  which  it  has  been  lifted  serves  but  to  pre- 
pare the  way  for  a  more  disastrous  and  irre- 
mediable fall.  The  comparative  study  of  his- 
tory makes  it  abundantly  evident  to  the  student 
of  to-day  that  each  generation  can  do  no  more 
for  its  successor  than  provide  it  with  a  stout 
platform  on  which  to  battle  out  its  own  des- 
tiny, wrestle  for  its  life,  prove  its  own  worthi- 
ness to  exist,  save  its  own  soul  from  the  death. 
At  first  sight,  there  seems  little  that  favors 


192  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

the  Christ  mind  in  the  conclusions  of  historic 
science.  Look  a  little  closer  and  you  will  see 
that  this  is  not  so.  The  very  essence  of  that 
mind  is  willingness,  for  the  good  of  others,  to 
forego  its  own  legitimate  advantage.  When 
first  a  few  ignorant  and  weak  men  dared  to 
proclaim  such  mind  as  the  final  type  of  human 
mind,  what  state  of  things  were  they  confronted 
by  ?  There  was  spread  all  over  the  known 
world  a  civilization  marvellous  in  its  success. 
Seemingly  it  was  established  forever.  It  had 
founded  itself  on  the  ruin  of  all  previous  civ- 
ilizations. It  had  borrowed  from  their  experi- 
ences ;  it  had  been  warned  by  their  failures. 
Its  rule  seemed  as  eternal  as  the  hills  of  its 
own  capital  city.  And  why?  Men  great  and 
small,  old  men  and  children,  had  lived,  planned 
toiled,  fought,  and  been  willing  to  die  for 
Rome ;  and  rich  in  the  self-sacrifice  of  her 
children,  Rome  stood  forth  steady  and  strong 
beyond  compare.  She  rose,  flourished,  and 
blessed  mankind.  But  Rome  grew  rich  and 
wanton;  both  rich  and  poor  alike  sunk  into 
selfishness.  The  poor  cried  only  for  bread  and 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  193 

pleasure,  and  the  rich  for  pleasure  and  power  ; 
and  so  the  crash  of  it  all  soon  came.  For  Rome 
was  but  the  husk  of  herself.  She  had  turned 
to  her  muck-heap,  and  forgotten  the  glory  of 
her  early  crown.  The  fair  became  foul,  the 
wife  a  wanton,  justice  was  sold,  honor  fled, 
the  mind  of  Christ  was  openly  scoffed  at.  She 
fell  and  her  fall  was  great.  Innocent  and  guilty 
fell  together,  for  the  hope  of  mankind  had 
been  betrayed  by  Rome.  On  her  wreck  and 
ruin,  after  a  time  of  doubt  and  dismay,  larger 
foundations  of  liberty  and  hope  for  mankind 
arose.  For  in  Frank,  Goth,  and  Visigoth,  and 
in  all  the  so-called  wave  of  barbarism  which 
had  swept  over  her,  possibilities  of  higher  life 
were  existent  which  were  no  longer  possible  to 
her.  On  these  Christianity  took  hold.  Their 
young  lives  were  her  new  seed-bed. 

It  is  not  doubtful  that  real  advance  has 
been  made  towards  the  realization  by  man  of 
"  the  mind  of  Christ."  In  regard  to  its  law,  we 
no  longer  stand  where  our  forefathers  stood. 
We  may  fail  sadly  still,  but  we  aim  at  higher 
things  than  they,  we  judge  ourselves  by  a 


194  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

higher  standard.  Our  ideals,  at  least,  are  less 
self-seeking.  To  prove  this  would  not  be  dif- 
ficult, but  as  time  fails  me,  I  must  content  my- 
self by  merely  stating  it. 

The  law  of  sacrifice  explained  and  illus- 
trated in  his  matchless  life  —  sealed  by  his 
lonely  dying —  is  the  gift  Jesus  gave  to  men. 
Jesus  of  course  used  the  language  and  similes 
he  best  knew  when  he  taught  it.  Paul  had 
other  learning  than  that  of  Jesus,  and  looked 
forth  on  an  enlarged  world.  Consequently  the 
Pauline  method  and  similes  are  not  those  Jesus 
himself  employed.  The  Christian  churches  — 
as  I  have  repeatedly  said  to  you  —  still  too 
often  feel  themselves  obliged  to  use  only 
those  methods,  similes,  forms  of  expression, 
that  Jesus  knew  and  used,  —  or  Paul  or  the 
early  Fathers  knew  and  used, — and  have  thus 
failed  to  make  reasonable  and  cogent  their 
appeal  to  modern  times.  For  instance,  science 
really  is  doing  far  more  to  commend  the  law 
of  sacrifice,  the  law  of  the  "  mind  of  Christ " 
to  men  to-day,  than  all  its  professed  followers 
and  nominal  advocates;   not  always  because 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  195 

these  last  are  not  sincere  and  intelligent,  but 
because  the  terms  they  use  sound  uncouth  and 
unreal  to  educated  men. 

We  have  not  ceased  to  believe  in  the  ne- 
cessity of  sacrifice.  Good  men  in  all  religions, 
wise  men  in  all  nations,  know  well  that  the 
law  of  sacrifice  is  a  vital  and  changeless  law, 
but  clinging  to  the  nomenclature  of  the  long 
past,  seeking  to  explain  the  sacrificial  life  in 
terms  out  of  date,  the  so-called  Christian  sys- 
tem of  sacrifice,  appears  unreal  and  absurd, 
and  often  unmoral  as  well.  Orthodox  termin- 
ology to-day  still  is  the  same  as  that  employed 
by  good  men  whose  conceptions  of  sacrifice 
found  their  most  natural  illustrations  in  the 
shambles,  in  lowing  herds  and  blood-sprinkled 
altars.  These  to  them  seemed  the  natural  way 
of  approach  to  God. 

Such  terms  as  justification,  expiation,  atone- 
ment, imputed  righteousness,  transferred  sin 
had  once  for  sacrificing  men  a  tremendous 
meaning.  To  use  them  to-day  is  but  to  be- 
wilder and  estrange  those  who  are  honestly 
seeking  to  conform  their  faulty  and  selfish 


196  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

lives  to  self-sacrifice's  changeless  and  univer- 
sal law.  Of  that  law  Jesus'  life  and  dying  are 
still  the  supreme  illustration,  but  orthodoxy 
now  veils  from  the  minds  of  multitudes  the 
real  significance  of  both. 

As  St.  Paul  handles  the  law  of  sacrifice  in 
the  passage  I  have  read  to  you,  it  is  as  fresh 
and  full  of  meaning  for  us  to-day  as  it  ever 
was.  The  Saviour,  whom  St.  Paul  speaks  of  as 
crowned  with  everlasting  glory,  and  before 
whose  august  feet  all  things  in  heaven  and 
earth  do  bow  and  obey,  sits  on  the  throne  of 
his  universe,  not  by  favor,  but  by  right.  He 
is  exalted  because  he  alone  has  explained  and 
vindicated  its  universal  law.  The  whole  uni- 
verse, animate  and  inanimate,  bends  in  hom- 
age to  him  because  he  has  made  glorious  its 
own  supreme  law  —  the  law  of  sacrifice  and 
of  service.  Through  all  the  dark  and  vapor- 
ous gray  ages  of  the  past,  that  law  has  slowly 
worked  out  its  painful  processes.  It  had  been 
sobbed  in  the  universe,  ages  before  it  was 
revealed  on  the  cross  of  Christ.  This  is  the 
force  of  St.  Paul's  "Wherefore."  Who  shall 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  197 

justify  to  the  universe  her  sorrow,  toil,  pain, 
dying?  Who  shall  stand  and  explain  her  long, 
long  travail  pang?  Man,  and  only  man. 
Only  a  Man-Child  glorious  can  pay  the  poor 
earth  back  for  her  long-drawn-out  travail  pang. 
Without  man  nature  is  inexplicable.  And 
man  stands  confused  before  himself,  uncer- 
tain of  whence  he  came  and  whither  he  goes, 
incapable  of  explaining  and  justifying  what 
he  is,  and  what  he  wants  to  be,  till  the  highest 
Man  stands  before  him  and  says:  "I  am  the 
way,  the  truth,  and  the  life.  No  man  cometh 
to  the  Father  but  by  me.  See  in  me  the  ex- 
planation of  all  that  you  see,  and  feel,  and 
hope  for  in  yourself." 

"  Therefore  God  hath  highly  exalted  him." 
The  life  of  Christ  is  the  final  type,  and  there- 
fore no  other  life  can  be  finally  successful. 
There  can  be  no  two  victorious  types.  The 
final  life  must  be  the  fitted  life.  The  unfitted 
must  cease  to  be.  The  life  that  lives  in  its  true 
relations,  —  to  permit  any  other  life  than  this 
to  survive  would  be  to  undo  what  the  ages 
have  been  doing  ;  would  be  to  reverse  the  law 


198  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

by  which  the  lower  die,  that  the  higher  may 
flourish.  God  himself  cannot  make  a  world 
in  which  the  saurian  exists  side  by  side  with 
man.  Saurians  are  the  best  possible  forms  of 
life  at  one  stage,  yet  impossible  at  the  next. 
The  conditions  of  the  saurian  are  the  condi- 
tions of  the  Carboniferous  age ;  these  would 
but  choke  and  strangle  the  man.  To  persist 
in  co?iditions  is  the  meaning  of  sin.  A  uni- 
verse favorable  to  the  highest  must  of  neces- 
sity be  less  favorable  to  that  which  is  not  so 
high.  The  mind  of  Christ  and  the  selfish  spirit 
of  self-seeking  cannot  finally  co-exist.  Which 
is  to  be  in  us,  brothers  ?  After  which  mind 
shall  we  live  ? 

So  let  me  conclude  as  I  began.  All  that 
this  university  stands  for,  these  friendships 
made,  these  halcyon  days  in  which  are  so  de- 
lightfully mingled  the  spring  and  zest  of  boy- 
hood, with  the  growing  sense  of  power  that 
belongs  to  early  manhood  —  all  can  avail  you 
but  little,  if  the  chief  value  of  them  you  let 
slip,  if  the  abiding  result  of  them  is  not  found 
with   you.   That   result   should   be  a   deeper 


THE   RELIGION  OF  JESUS  199 

knowledge  than  is  possible  to  others  who  have 
not  had  your  advantages  —  a  knowledge  of 
what  goes  to  make  manhood  worthy  and  true 
living  possible.  Your  outlook  on  life  should 
surely  be  not  less  sympathetic  than  that  of 
other  men  because  of  these  splendid  oppor- 
tunities that  you  have  enjoyed.  It  is  men  the 
hour  calls  for,  men  who  know  themselves  to 
have  a  mission,  and  who  can  and  will  turn 
away  from  all  other  prizes  to  win  that  one  life 
prize ;  from  all  other  siren  voices  to  listen  to 
that  "  one  clear  call  for  me." 

Oh,  my  brothers,  you  come  not  here  to 
complete  your  life  studies,  but  to  fit  yourselves 
to  pursue  them.  The  study  you  have  known 
here  has,  if  it  be  worth  anything,  cost  you 
something.  The  study  that  awaits  you  in  the 
great  world  will  surely  cost  you  more.  "  Look 
not  on  your  own  things  "  —  not  to  your  own 
aggrandizement,  nor  the  building  of  your  for- 
tune —  but  look  on  men,  and  you  will  learn 
to  know  them  a  little,  and,  as  you  know,  to 
love  them  more.  Pursue  pleasure  and  it  will 
pall  on  you.  Give  your  soul  up  to  toil,  and 


200  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

work  will  become  some  day  unendurable.  But 
the  man  who  gives  out  his  best  to  his  fellow 
man  is  never  utterly  cast  down  or  disheart- 
ened. No  numbing  cares  can  quite  paralyze 
the  reverent  student  of  men.  Falls  and  fail- 
ures he  may  make ;  but  from  them  all,  like 
the  fabled  Antaeus  of  old,  he  will  rise  re- 
freshed, for  he  has  touched  his  fellow.  "  Look 
not  on  your  own  things,"  and  you  will  learn 
to  love,  love  with  a  discriminating  hopeful- 
ness that  rises  above  all  disappointments,  and 
year  by  year  discovers  promise  of  a  life  that 
is  worth  living. 

I  have  visited  all  the  cities  and  all  the  states 
in  this  great  land  of  ours ;  but  from  out  them 
all,  to  my  mind,  one  building  stands  preemi- 
nently beautiful  and  eloquent.  It  is  the  Me- 
morial Hall  at  Harvard.  It  tells  the  story  of 
a  college  generation  that  earnestly  looked  on 
the  things  of  others.  It  tells  the  story  of  brave 
deeds  following  that  persistent  looking.  They 
had  their  hour,  those  men  of  fifty  years  ago, 
and  they  heard  their  call.  A  golden  haze  of 
distance  already  hangs  over  that  past  time.  It 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  201 

seems  to  us  very  glorious,  but  also  very  sim- 
ple, very  easy.  They  could  not  have  done 
other  than  they  did.  Ah,  that  is  how  problems 
of  one  age  always  look  to  the  next.  It  did  not 
seem  so  to  them.  Partings  had  to  be  made, 
prejudices  met,  and  deep  questionings  an- 
swered ;  yet  out  of  them  all  they  passed  tri- 
umphant. They  did  their  duty,  suffered  and 
died,  many  of  them,  before  they  knew  they 
had  won.  How  ?  What  mind  was  theirs  in 
that  momentous  hour,  in  those  desperate  years 
of  civil  strife  ?  It  was  the  law  of  sacrifice,  it 
was  the  mind  of  Christ.  The  cause  was  man's, 
the  end  his  salvation  ;  and  the  means,  the  only 
means,  sacrifice.  Man  never  could  be,  never 
can  be,  saved  by  any  other.  If  you  would 
save  him,  you  must  die  for  him. 

Have  not  many  of  you  often  looked  on  the 
old  war  monuments,  and  wished  with  all  your 
hearts  that  a  duty  as  simple  and  direct  as  the 
duty  of  those  days  was  yours  to-day?  wished 
that  you,  too,  could  hear  a  voice  that  called, 
and  know  it  to  be  divine?  But  uncertainty  sur- 
rounds you,  checks  you,  benumbs  you.  It  is 


202  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

hard  to  find  the  truth,  hard  to  know  what  to 
do.  On  sociological  questions  we  are  at  sea;  on 
theological,  we  are  divided ;  on  political,  we 
sometimes  fiercely  differ.  We  often  feel  deeply 
with  Matthew  Arnold :  — 

But  now  the  old  is  out  of  date, 
The  new  is  not  yet  born. 

Brothers,  as  your  chosen  preacher,  feeling 
the  solemnity  of  this  occasion,  one  that  can- 
not recur  in  my  life  or  yours  again,  I  call  on 
you,  by  all  that  is  highest  and  holiest,  all  that 
in  your  own  nature  answers  and  echoes  God, 
I  call  on  you  to  put  before  you,  as  an  end  and 
object  in  your  life,  the  knowledge  and  the  ser- 
vice of  men,  —  not  of  classmates  or  of  partners 
only,  but  of  men  unlike  yourself,  environed 
differently,  differently  endowed.  Begin  to  do 
this  now,  try  to  do  it  faithfully.  More  light 
and  a  clearer  call  shall  be  yours  by  and  by. 
Look  earnestly  not  on  your  own  things,  but 
on  the  things  of  others.  Look  on  man,  God's 
last  and  highest  work,  and  in  that  work  you 
will  learn  to  see  and  reverence  divine  purpose. 
Give  men  your  mind,  give  them  your  hand, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  203 

and  you  cannot  in  time  withhold  your  heart. 
Know  the  ignorant,  to  teach  them ;  know  the 
weak,  to  help  them ;  those  who  are  out  of  the 
way,  to  lead  them  back.  Oh,  get  to  know  the 
boys  in  the  great  cities,  and  share  with  them 
some  of  those  priceless  advantages  that  have 
enlarged  your  life.  Know  the  wounded,  to 
heal  them,  the  sorrowing  to  comfort  them. 
Know  the  sinful,  to  forgive  and  save  them. 
Only  set  yourselves  by  the  help  of  God  to  this 
lifelong  purpose,  cost  what  it  may.  Sacrifice 
time,  self-interest,  ambition,  and  fortune  to  it 
—  set  yourselves,  I  say,  to  hioio  men;  and  you 
have  laid  the  foundation  for  a  life  that  can- 
not fail,  and  a  hope  that  shall  not  be  disap- 
pointed. 


204  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 


VI 

JESUS'  DOCTRINE  OF  MAN'S  APPROACH  TO  GOD 

If  thou  canst  do  any  thing,  have  compassion  on  us,  and  help  us. 
Jesus  said  unto  him,  If  thou  canst  believe,  all  things  are  possible 
to  him  that  believeth.  —  Mark  ix,  22,  23. 

For  the  sake  of  clearness,  will  you  pardon 
me  if  I  recapitulate  a  little  in  this  my  last  ad- 
dress to  you.  I  have  tried  to  show  you  that 
the  message  of  good  news  Jesus  brought  to 
men  has  of  necessity  undergone  many  changes 
since  he  delivered  it  and  we  in  our  day  re- 
ceived it.  Yet  in  spite  of  all  change  the  vital 
germ  of  it,  the  all-important  part  of  it,  the 
seed  of  it,  is  unquestionably  ours  still.  We  need 
it  as  bread  for  our  own  souls,  and  as  living 
seed  which  we  too  must  sow  afresh  for  the 
harvesting  of  those  who  come  after  us. 

Our  view  of  the  world  in  which  we  live  is  not 
in  many  ways  the  view  Jesus,  as  a  Jew,  held. 
Yet  different,  profoundly  different  though 
that  view  be,  I  have  tried  to  show  you  that  we 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  205 

cannot  part  with  Jesus,  we  need  not  part  with 
Jesus,  with  his  hopes,  with  his  standards,  with 
his  doctrine  of  the  nature  of  man  and  of  God, 
or  with  his  teachings  as  to  man's  place  and 
duty  in  the  world. 

As  I  said,  before  I  speak  of  what  Jesus 
meant  by  faith,  "  man's  way  of  approach  to 
God,"  let  me  for  clearness'  sake  restate  briefly 
what  most  thoughtful  Christian  men  would 
agree,  I  think,  in  believing  to  be  man's  place 
in  the  world.  This  world  in  which  we  live  and 
play  our  brief  part  is  God's  world,  created, 
guided,  upheld,  and  saved  by  God.  His  life  is 
its  life.  To  believe  this  must  profoundly  in- 
fluence our  ideas  as  to  our  place  in  it  and  our 
duty  to  it.  Resolutely  we  must  lay  aside  as  in- 
adequate and  untrue  theories  based  on  the 
world's  independence  of  God  and  opposition  to 
God.  (This,  be  it  remembered,  the  early  Chris- 
tians were  not  always  successful  in  doing — 
instance  the  apocalyptic  literature  of  early 
times.) 

Unless  we  hold  this  attitude  firmly,  we 
must  be  prepared  to  find  ourselves  in  opposi- 


206  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

tion  to  the  scientific  spirit,  and  to  much  that 
is  best  in  that  earnest  attitude  of  reverent  re- 
search —  to  which  our  time  owes  so  much. 
This  modern  spirit  is,  as  I  have  tried  to  show 
you,  "  of  the  mind  of  Christ,"  and  should  be 
greeted  as  an  ally  and  not  as  an  opponent. 
Christendom  as  a  whole  is  as  yet  far  from  ac- 
cepting this  truth ;  not  even  in  theory  are  we 
always  prepared  to  say  with  Jesus  and  with 
Paul,  "  We  are  fellow  workers  with  God." 
They  long  ago  saw  that  this  was  the  real 
meaning  of  man's  life  on  earth,  and  joy  and 
confidence  came  to  those  much  persecuted  men 
as  they  declared  it.  But  we  are  privileged  to 
see  as  they  could  not,  that  not  only  were  the 
followers  of  Jesus  so  working,  but  that  all 
good  men  everywhere  —  and  not  men  only, 
but  the  very  nature  of  things  —  were  working 
for  the  light  and  against  the  darkness,  for 
God  and  against  self-will  and  evil. 

It  may  surprise  you,  but  it  is  none  the  less 
true,  that  in  our  country  and  in  our  times 
there  is  a  distinct  reaction  against  these  best, 
clearest,  earliest  teachings  of  Jesus.    There  is 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  207 

a  harking-back  to  the  dualism  of  long  ago; 
and  people  who  loudly  claim  to  be  walking  by 
the  aid  of  new  lights  are  repeating  very  old 
and  very  gross  errors. 

God,  they  say,  is  to  be  found  outside  ordin- 
ary physical  conditions,  rather  than  in  them. 
With  great  variety  and  confusion  of  language, 
it  is  declared  that  only  by  ignoring,  overcom- 
ing, and  denying  these,  rather  than  by  study- 
ing and  accepting  them,  can  man  win  his 
vision  of  God.  These  modern  mystics  cannot 
bring  themselves  to  believe  that  the  earth  is 
the  true  field  of  man's  life  —  as  it  was  of  the 
Master's  life;  that  it  is  the  garden  in  which 
the  gardener  walks  and  talks  with  God.  This 
very  old  misconception  of  man's  relation  to 
the  world  has  taken,  in  different  ages,  varying 
forms  of  expression.  To-day,  it  is  taking 
newer,  but  none  the  less  mistaken  and  hurtful 
forms.  The  Christian  Scientist  denies  stoutly 
the  reality  of  his  body.  He  goes  a  little  fur- 
ther than  his  forbears  of  the  fourth  and  fifth 
centuries,  and  says  his  real  life  can  be  won  only 
by  denying  the  actuality  of  the  material  life. 


208  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

The  material  universe  is  to  him  non-existent. 
God  is  spirit,  and  is  revealed  only  in  the 
spiritual.  All  material  things  are  but  hin- 
drances and  illusions. 

This  and  some  other  even  cruder  forms  of 
mysticism  are  all  based  on  the  same  faulty 
conception  of  God's  relation  to  the  universe 
and  of  man's  place  in  it.  The  mystic  religion- 
ist, the  spiritual  medium,  the  half-cheating 
clairvoyant,  the  Christian  Scientist  healer  and 
expounder  are  but  separate  companies  in  one 
regiment,  many  hundreds  of  years  old,  one 
and  all  of  them  seeking  an  outside  God,  not 
the  real,  reasonable  God,  ever  self-revealing  in 
the  natural  order  of  the  universe,  and  so  in 
human  life.  They  turn  from  the  Father  of 
spirits  and  of  men,  the  God  of  evolution  and 
of  history,  to  the  God  who  speaks  in  "the 
sign" 

The  God  and  Father  of  Jesus  is  the  God 
who  owns  and  sustains  the  world.  He  is  as 
much  present  here  as  in  heaven.  The  present 
life  is  God's  as  truly  as  the  unknown  life  be- 
yond the  grave.     To  deny  this,  to  ignore  it, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  209 

separates  the  religious  faculty  from  the  rest 
of  man's  faculties.  It  is  an  effort  to  live  outside 
God's  chosen  environment  for  man,  and  pre- 
cludes his  being  the  one  thing  he  is  evidently 
called  to  be,  here  and  now  (whatever  he  may 
be  called  to  be  or  do  hereafter),  an  intelligent 
and  loving  fellow  worker  with  God,  under 
bodily  conditions,  in  an  actual  world  where 
he  is  limited  by  time  and  space. 

This  world,  in  the  teachings  of  Jesus,  is  not 
immoral,  but  as  yet  unmoral,  waiting  the  seed 
of  truth;  the  nature  of  things  not  evil,  but 
potentially  good;  the  animal  not  opposed  to 
the  divine,  but  God's  animal,  awaiting  enlight- 
enment through  the  divine.  Jesus  is  in  his 
Father's  world,  and  he  knows  it.  God  has  al- 
ways worked  in  it,  and  works  in  it  now,  and 
Jesus,  as  he  lives  in  it,  is  continuing  his  Fa- 
ther's works,  the  works  he  was  sent  to  do.  His 
life-blood  is  the  very  life-blood  of  the  world's 
life,  is  a  part  of  that  life,  and  grows  as  it 
grows.  To  save  that  world  for  its  highest  needs 
and  purposes  —  for  this  he  gladly  lays  down 
his  life.  Here  he  leads  men.  Here  he  explains 


210  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

to  us  men  our  vocation,  our  ministry;  shows 
us,  as  nobody  ever  did  or  could,  man's  true 
place  in  the  world.  All  things  are  for  man. 
When  man  comes,  he  comes  to  control,  and 
his  control  is  beneficent.  His  work  is  to  change 
the  beautiful,  savage  earth  into  a  beautiful, 
fruitful  world.  He  must  everywhere  play  the 
god  whether  he  will  or  not  —  sometimes,  alas, 
it  is  a  devil  god  he  plays,  but  ruler  he  is  ever. 
The  beautiful  legend  of  Genesis  is  true  to  the 
core.  The  world  is  given  to  man.  In  it  he  but 
makes  good  his  divine  title ;  no  one  will  do  his 
work  for  him  —  not  even  God.  The  seas  have 
their  work,  the  seasons  fulfil  their  destiny. 
Forces  known  and  unknown,  operative  in  the 
world,  are  yet  all  subordinate  to  man,  the 
earth's  lord;  he  is  its  engineer,  its  director;  he 
the  controller  of  all  its  forces.  And  just  as  the 
wise  father  will  leave  his  son  unaided,  often, 
to  work  out  his  boyish  tasks,  or  grapple  with 
the  problems  of  early  manhood,  so  God  will 
not  put  an  interfering  hand  to  the  great  busi- 
ness. Appalled  by  its  greatness,  abashed  by 
his  own  mistakes,  the  tragedies,  the  disasters 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  211 

attending  them,  again  and  again  man  cries  for 
an  interfering  grace;  but  it  may  not  be.  Is 
it  cruel  thus  to  leave  him  alone?  Nay,  infinite 
wisdom  and  love  knows  its  necessity.  We  send 
our  boys  to  school,  and  a  hard  task  it  is, 
harder  for  the  love  that  sends  them  to  endure 
its  part  of  the  task  than  for  the  boy  so  sent; 
but  the  boy's  life  has  to  be  lived  in  its  own 
way,  and  under  its  wisely  chosen  conditions. 
The  strangeness  and  the  loneliness  of  school 
have  to  be  met,  and  in  conquering  these  and 
reaping  the  opportunities  that  go  with  them, 
the  lad  takes  his  successful  steps  towards  man- 
hood. We  are  in  our  own  small  way  copying 
the  great  Master  all  the  time,  and  as  we  copy 
we  do  well.  It  is  not  cruel  to  leave  man  to  his 
tasks  alone.  Infinite  love  and  wisdom  have 
proved  that  long  ago,  and  sorrow,  loss,  defeat, 
pain,  and  sure  death  ending  it  all,  these  can- 
not be  done  away  with.  At  view  of  them  often 
we  stand  doubtful  and  discouraged.  But 
heavenly  interference  we  shall  never  have  — 
for  only  thus  can  wre  wrin  our  mastery. 

Let  me  put  it  simply  by  way  of  illustration. 


212  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

I  have  a  farm  in  Connecticut.  One  day,  long 
years  ago,  I  noticed  a  wild  bit  of  land  hard 
by.  It  was  rough  and  woody,  there  was  swamp 
and  marshland  too,  a  spring  spread  itself  into 
a  little  bog ;  many  thorns  and  thistles  there 
were,  with  a  few  wild  flowers  among  them. 
But  a  man  with  will  to  work  and  knowledge 
how  to  work  came  that  way,  and  the  swamp 
gave  place  to  a  spring,  the  tangled  thicket  be- 
came a  woodland.  Where  once  the  roughest 
sort  of  pasturage  lay,  a  rich  field  with  its 
crop  of  hay  and  grain  arose;  and  soon  a  home- 
stead and  garden  were  there  too.  This  is  what 
man  can  do.  This  is  what  man  was  sent  to  do. 
Here  is  a  living  picture  of  man's  place  in  the 
world.  The  thicket  was  not  without  a  beauty 
of  its  own,  but  the  woodland  was  better.  In 
the  marsh  there  was  native  beauty,  but  the 
clear  spring  and  flowery  meadow  were  better. 
The  farmhouse  and  fruitful  garden  meant  a 
higher  presence  and  a  greater  good.  All  the 
possibilities  of  fruitfulness  and  of  beauty  in 
home-making  were  there  in  the  wild  neglected 
tract.  All  they  wanted  was  a  man  to  call  them 


THE   RELIGION  OF  JESUS  213 

forth.  To  this  work  God  ever  calls  his  farmer 
children.  To  push  my  illustration  a  little  fur- 
ther, this  too  makes  plain  the  relationship  of 
Jesus  to  the  rest  of  mankind.  Christ's  place  is 
inside  the  race,  not  outside  it ;  with  us  in  all 
our  experiences,  not  outside  our  experiences. 
He  explains  to  us  our  own  possibilities,  re- 
veals to  us  our  own  life  ;  has  only  come  that 
we  may  have  our  own  life  more  abundantly 
than  we  have  had  it  before.  All  the  coarser, 
earlier  elements  of  the  world  are  in  us.  In  us, 
too,  waiting  for  his  call  and  leadership,  are 
the  higher,  holier,  humaner  things  waiting  to 
be  born.  Even  the  lower  in  us  is  God's  lower 
waiting  God's  higher  ;  not  the  immoral  man, 
but  the  unmoral  man.  If  we  will  go  with  him, 
follow  and  obey  him  in  working  towards  the 
higher,  we  are  just  like  the  farmer  at  what  at 
first  seemed  his  unthankful  and  hopeless  task. 
If  we  insist  on  going  back  to  the  days  of  primi- 
tive man,  we  go  back  to  the  beasts  —  and 
there  is  sin ;  if  we  obey  the  spiritual,  we  rise 
to  Christ  —  and  there  is  the  divine  ;  but  one 
grows  out  of  the  other  in  orderly  process.  The 


214  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

spiritual  is  the  evolution  of  the  primitive. 
We  grow  as  the  world  grows  from  lower  to 
higher,  from  slaveship  to  sonship.  Neglect 
the  farm,  and  the  fields  drop  back  to  the 
thicket,  the  spring  sinks  again  into  the  marsh- 
land, the  weed  chokes  the  garden,  the  fruit 
trees  planted  with  so  much  care  go  back  to 
the  crab-tree,  and  the  lower  denizens  of  the 
wild  return. 

Oh,  is  it  not  a  reasonable  work,  a  lovely  and 
a  free  service  !  Let  us  take  his  view  and  follow 
him,  "  fellow  workers  with  God,"  as  Paul 
dared  to  call  it  long  ago,  carrying  out  his  pur- 
poses to  a  certain  and  a  splendid  end.  But, 
oh,  mark  me !  There  is  no  mere  law  in  all 
this,  no  mere  inevitable  good,  no  unsought 
salvation  ever  won,  no  mere  blind  law  ever 
working,  but  millions  of  free,  self -determining 
wills;  not  one  Christ,  but  many;  not  God  doing 
things  for  us  as  though  we  were  parts  of  a 
machine,  but  God  the  Father  doing  things  by 
us,  giving  us  more  power,  more  knowledge, 
more  light,  more  freedom,  more  responsibility, 
as  we  are  fit  for  them.  And  the  rule,  the  law, 


THE   RELIGION   OF  JESUS  215 

the  way  by  which  we  can  alone  do  these  things 
worth  doing  is  —  Faith.  Here  is  the  old,  old 
subject.  Is  it  a  reasonable  demand  ?  Can  or- 
dinary men  comply  with  it  ?  Can  all  men  ex- 
ercise this  working  faith  ?  Of  all  questions 
the  thoughtful  man  is  called  on  to  face,  there 
can,  I  think,  be  none  more  important  than 
this.  There  are  those  —  not  a  few  —  who  tell 
us  faith  is  waning.  On  the  other  hand,  there 
are  many,  at  least  as  competent  to  form  a 
judgment,  who  confidently  assert  that  our  age 
is  preeminently  one  of  faith.  Goethe  says  the 
ages  of  belief  are  the  only  fruitful  ages,  and 
history  backs  his  opinion.  If  faith  is  slowly 
waning  from  the  earth,  and  the  most  pro- 
gressive peoples  are  learning  to  live  without 
it,  the  fact  is  one  of  gravest  significance.  If, 
on  the  other  hand,  it  is  only  the  antiquated 
and  infirm  forms  of  faith  (her  cast-off  gar- 
ments) that  are  passing,  cast  aside  as  things 
no  longer  usable,  while  the  real  body  and  life 
of  faith  are  quick  and  vital,  then  the  time  is 
ripe  for  new  and  simpler  definitions  of  what 
our  honored  forbears  called  "  saving  faith." 


216  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

With  this  last  view  I  am  very  heartily  in 
accord,  and  to-day  I  wish  to  insist  that  faith 
as  demanded  hy  Jesus  Christ  never  was  meant 
to  be  adhesion  to  any  credal  statement,  but  a 
vital  obedience  to  and  trust  in  a  living  man, 
who  in  his  person  and  teaching  revealed  two 
things  as  they  never  had  been  revealed  before 
—  the  nature  of  man  and  the  nature  of  God. 

First  of  all,  I  ask  you  to  consider  that  Jesus 
wins  from  all  sorts  of  people  the  response  of 
faith  that  he  desires.  The  most  unpromising 
win  their  way  to  him  and  gain  his  approval. 
He  expects  to  find  good  in  men,  to  find  some- 
thing worth  helping  and  saving  in  them,  and 
to  find  this  worthiness  in  the  most  unlikely 
places. 

In  order  to  understand  what  Jesus  meant 
and  what  he  taught  about  faith,  we  must  re- 
fuse to  separate  his  acts  and  his  words.  We 
must  put  acts  and  words  together,  and  then 
what  he  does  will  illustrate  what  he  says. 
Here,  I  venture  to  think,  Christian  men  have 
very  often  failed. 

We  take  a  word  of  his  —  this  word  faith, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  217 

belief ;  we  find  that  to  those  who  have  it  and 
exercise  it  he  constantly  makes  such  promises 
as  these  :  "  All  things  are  possible  to  him  that 
belie veth "  ;  "He  that  believeth  on  the  Son 
hath  everlasting  life " ;  "He  that  believeth 
on  me,  though  he  were  dead,  yet  shall  he 
live."  No  words  seem  too  strong  when  he 
seeks  to  express  his  fear  for  those  who  have 
it,  and  exercise  it  not :  "  He  that  believeth  not 
shall  not  see  life,  but  the  wrath  of  God  abid- 
eth  on  him  "  ;  and  a  multitude  of  similar 
passages.  We  remember  these  passages,  but 
we  forget  the  circumstances  in  which  they 
were  spoken.  Did  we  remember  them,  the 
circumstances  would  illuminate  and  make  their 
meaning  plain.  These,  however,  we  ignore, 
and  the  unfortunate  result  arises  that,  before 
we  are  aware  of  it,  faith  seems  to  become  an 
unreal,  impossible  thing,  a  demand  with  which 
we  cannot  comply,  a  possession  which  but  few 
have.  Thus  it  fades,  and  the  Christianity  of 
which  it  is  the  root  and  spirit,  fades  too. 

Notice,  then,  that  from  all  sorts  of  people 
— the  learned  and  the  unlearned,  the  stranger 


218  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

of  a  day  and  the  lifelong  friend,  the  disciple 
who  clings  to  him,  and  the  casual  visitor  who 
comes  to  him  only  for  some  one  thing,  and, 
having  got  it,  goes  away  —  from  all  alike 
Jesus  demands  faith  and  belief.  He  will  have 
no  dealings  with  men  without  it. 

In  word  or  act  of  Jesus  we  can  find  no  pre- 
cedent for  the  state  of  things  which  we  have 
brought  about  to-day.  We  have  made  faith 
seem  difficult ;  so  difficult  that  multitudes  of 
our  very  best  men  and  women  turn  from  the 
Church,  because  in  their  souls  they  believe  it 
is  impossible  for  them  to  yield  to  the  demand 
which  the  Church  makes  on  them  for  faith. 
They  are  just  as  good  as  the  Church  people 
from  whose  company  they  turn  ;  as  kind  to 
their  children,  as  faithful  in  their  loves  and 
friendships,  as  scrupulously  honest  in  their 
lives,  as  fervent  in  their  patriotism,  as  ready 
to  serve  and  suffer  for  their  fellow  men.  Their 
aims  are  the  aims  of  all  good  men  and  women, 
and  yet  they  are  turning  away  sadly  or  indif- 
ferently from  the  Church  and  from  Christ. 
And  why  are  they  doing  it  ?  Because  we  have 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  219 

made  his  claims  on  them  appear  to  be  claims 
with  which  they  cannot  in  their  conscience  feel 
it  is  right  to  comply. 

This  is  nothing  less  than  a  perverting  of 
the  known  character  of  Jesus,  an  unlawful 
reversal  of  his  method  and  unfaithful  pre- 
sentation of  his  message.  So  far  as  we  have 
achieved  this  result  we  have  not  been  faithful 
witnesses  to  God  for  our  own  time  and  gener- 
ation. I  claim  not  only  a  word  or  a  text  here 
and  there  in  the  inspired  records,  but  the  whole 
lifelong  conduct  of  Jesus,  in  proof  of  the  truth 
of  what  I  have  said,  that  when  he  demanded 
faith  and  belief  from  men,  he  demanded  some- 
thing which  he  thought  the  everyday  man 
was  able  to  give. 

Let  us  notice,  then,  that  our  Lord  came 
not  to  create  barriers  between  God  and  men, 
to  thrust  man  farther  from  God,  to  call  the 
few  to  their  Father.  His  yoke  was  easy,  his 
burden  was  light,  the  door  of  his  feast  stood 
wide  open,  the  wanderers  in  waysides  and 
hedges  were  welcome  therein.  When  he  sowed 
the  seed  of  the  kingdom,  the  rocky  road,  the 


220  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

choking  thorn,  the  barren  hillside  as  well  as 
the  fruitful  earth,  liberally  received  the  golden 
grain.  He  sought  no  rare  possession  like  gen- 
ius in  man.  No;  he  fastened  on  some  common 
gift,  the  most  universal,  when  he  appealed  to 
faith  and  belief.  This  was  Jesus'  fixed  con- 
viction. Every  little  child,  he  said,  had  faith 
naturally  within,  and  could  substantially  ex- 
ercise it.  In  Christ's  view  to  demand  faith  is 
to  make  no  unfairly  difficult  demand. 

Nor  can  belief  be  confused  with  credulity. 
This  Jesus  rebukes  again  and  again.  Cred- 
ulity turns  the  soul  into  an  ash-heap  on  which 
are  cast  together  all  sorts  of  things  good  and 
bad,  and  all  alike  are  wasted.  Credulity  is 
not  clear-eyed,  but  blear-eyed.  Credulity  abases 
judgment.  Credulity  is  a  traveller  without  a 
guide,  or  one  with  a  hundred  guides,  who  is 
trying  to  follow  them  all  in  turn.  He  blunders 
round  in  a  circle,  makes  no  progress,  and  wins 
no  goal  either  of  character  or  of  attainment. 

Nor  can  faith,  as  Jesus  demands  it,  be  the 
development  of  ourselves  at  the  cost  of  some 
one  part  of  ourselves  (though  this  fallacy  has 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  221 

been  taught  again  and  again),  at  the  cost  of 
that  part  of  us  by  which  we  know  and  judge 
of  all  other  things  —  our  reason.  Faith  cannot 
be  created,  called  out,  developed,  at  the  cost 
of  reason;  for  to  play  off  our  faith  against 
our  reason  is  to  raise  a  civil  war  in  man,  de- 
structive, fratricidal,  and  unnatural. 

I  would  like  in  passing  to  recall  what  Lord 
Bacon  says  about  this :  "  It  were  better,"  he 
says,  "  to  have  no  opinion  at  all  of  God  than 
such  an  opinion  as  is  unworthy  of  him;  for 
the  one  is  unbelief,  the  other  contumely ."  He 
then  goes  on  to  illustrate  :  "  Plutarch  said  well, 
'I  would  rather  a  great  deal  men  said  there 
was  no  such  man  as  Plutarch  at  all  than  that 
they  should  say  there  was  one,  Plutarch,  who 
would  eat  his  own  children  as  soon  as  born.' " 
For  this  was  what  the  priests  of  Saturn  taught 
that  Saturn  did. 

In  the  light,  then,  of  the  plain  practice  of 
Jesus  as  told  to  us  in  the  Evangelists,  I  think 
it  is  evident  that  there  were  three  things  faith 
was  not :  not  difficult  or  rare,  not  credulous, 
and  in  no  way  opposed  to  reason. 


222  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

Now  see  how  this  wonderful  story  of  the 
transfigured  Christ  coming  down  from  the 
mountain  to  relieve  his  sorely  confused  and 
beset  disciples,  and  help  the  father  in  his  mis- 
ery and  the  son  in  his  epilepsy,  illustrates  what 
Jesus  would  have  us  believe  that  faith  is.  No- 
tice first  that  here  Christ  confronts  all  that  is 
most  hopeless  in  life.  He  is  face  to  face  with 
life's  tragedy ;  for  here  we  see  a  father's  mis- 
ery, a  son's  insanity,  a  disciple's  stupidity, 
while  round  the  spectacle  gathers  the  helpless, 
gaping  crowd.  A  father  is  crying  for  help, 
such  help  as  love  needs  for  its  loved  ones.  The 
cry  is  the  cry  of  need,  of  need  for  another, 
for  another's  pain.  Most  of  us  have  felt  it  — 
pain  so  much  deeper,  sharper,  more  unbearably 
bitter  than  any  pain  of  our  own.  It  is  the  cry 
of  him  who  has  tried  all  known  methods,  tested 
all  panaceas,  and  won  no  relief.  His  long 
course  of  disappointment  has  robbed  him  of 
all  faith.  Expectation  even  is  almost  dead. 
Hear  him  speak  for  himself.  "If  thou  canst 
do  any  thing,  have  pity  upon  us  and  help  us." 
But  this  is  not  the  only  misery  that  confronts 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  223 

the  Lord.  Here  is  a  son's  insanity,  the  very 
quintessence  of  earthly  failure.  How  weary 
we  sometimes  grow  of  failure,  weary  of  bear- 
ing the  burden  of  failure  which  is  the  result 
of  our  own  miscalculation  or  sin.  But  harder 
still  is  it  to  confront  hopefully  that  heavy 
burden  of  failure  which  seems  to  weigh  on 
the  world  from  no  immediate  fault  of  its  own 
—  failure  the  result  of  some  hidden  deed,  some 
forgotten  sin  of  long  ago,  an  hereditary  taint 
handed  down,  bringing  forth  at  last  its  bitter 
Dead  Sea  fruit. 

But  another  failure  confronts  Jesus  here, 
a  failure  more  near  and  intimate.  His  chosen 
disciples,  whose  great  task  lies  before  them  as 
yet  unattempted,  they  who  must  minister  to 
pain,  they  who,  inspired  by  him,  must  go  forth 
to  heal  earth's  failures,  seeking  to  uplift  and 
inspire  those  multitudes  of  men  whom  it  is  so 
hard  permanently  to  touch,  —  these  men  have 
failed  in  their  efforts  to  help  the  boy.  What 
promise  is  this  for  the  work  before  them?  For 
these  men  must  be  not  only  soldiers  sharing 
the  dangers  of  the  field,  but  while  they  fight 


224  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

they  must  bring  succour.  They  must  be  invinc- 
ible veterans  fighting  with  one  hand,  and 
bearing*  the  wounded  to  shelter  with  the  other. 
So  we  behold  our  Lord  confronted  by  the 
human  need  of  the  father's  misery,  the  son's 
insanity,  and  the  sad  incapacity  of  earthly 
ministry.  What  does  Christ  do  ?  It  is  all-im- 
portant that  we  should  know.  Something  in 
all  these  men,  he  says,  is  put  there  by  God,  a 
quality  which  lies  within  them,  buried  and  al- 
most lost,  perhaps,  but  still  resident,  responsive 
to  meet  just  such  occasions  as  these.  The  most 
real  of  all  human  need  carries,  Christ  teaches 
us,  the  cure  for  its  want  in  its  own  bosom. 
Belief  lies  almost  dead  there  among  those  men 
because  unused  for  so  long.  But  father  and 
disciple  alike,  even  in  the  face  of  such  dif- 
ficulties, can  exercise  a  trust  so  vital,  so  warm, 
so  strong  that  not  only  can  they  stand  up  in 
it  and  conquer  for  themselves,  but  the  influ- 
ence of  their  own  faith  can  work  the  deliver- 
ance from  what  seems  to  be  a  hopeless  failure, 
and  break  the  ties  that  have  bound  this  boy 
in  darkness  from  his  cradle. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  225 

And  what  is  this  belief  which  Jesus  demands 
and  calls  into  exercise,  which  he  challenges, 
and  which  immediately  comes  forth  in  obedi- 
ence to  his  challenge  ?  He  does  not  enter  into 
disquisition  or  definition  of  it.  He  does  not 
even  say,  "  Believe  in  me."  It  is  just  belief  in 
God,  belief  that  he  is  good,  not  bad ;  that  he 
is  near,  not  far ;  that  he  is  loving,  not  indiffer- 
ent ;  that  he  is  all-powerful,  not  powerless ; 
belief  that  he  is  the  sort  of  God,  in  short,  that 
the  distracted  father,  the  imbecile  son,  and 
the  despairing  disciple  really  want,  if  they 
will  but  have  it  so :  a  God  who  cares. 

Jesus  tells  them  that  they  do  believe  in 
God,  that  they  have  always  believed  in  God, 
that  it  is  human  instinct  to  have  faith  in  God. 
"  Arise  and  exercise  what  is  your  own,  and 
all  things  are  possible  to  him  that  believeth." 
To  convince  them  of  the  truth  of  the  great 
power,  of  the  possibilities  of  the  exercise  of 
this  power  within  them,  Jesus  will  give  them 
a  display  of  divine  power.  He  cannot  repeat 
such  displays  forever :  by  doing  so  he  would 
make  them  meaningless.  He  will  not  break  in 


226  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

on  his  father's  laws,  —  which  are  the  best 
laws  possible  for  men,  —  but  he  will  more 
fully  reveal  those  laws ;  and,  therefore,  he 
works  what  people  call  a  miracle.  That  does 
not  mean  that  he  will  do  a  supernatural  deed, 
but  he  will  more  fully  explain  the  natural. 
He  will  not  alter  by  one  degree  any  divine 
order,  but  he  will  give  in  his  own  person  an 
illustration  of  the  beauty  of  the  order.  He 
will  show  that  it  is  God's  will  that  misery,  in- 
sanity, stupidity  should  cease  to  be,  and  that 
when  men  are  at  one  with  God  as  he  is,  these 
old  oppressions  of  earth  are  powerless  to  re- 
sist their  faithful,  God-trusting  will.  To  them, 
then,  is  entrusted  a  power  before  which  the 
long  entrenched  evils  of  earth  shrivel  up  and 
disappear. 

We  know  that  as  long  as  this  Jesus  stood 
before  men,  living  the  life  that  inspired  them, 
doing  the  deeds  that  thrilled  them,  using  the 
old  word  faith,  belief,  and  breathing  into  it 
absolutely  new  meaning,  so  long  did  faith  to 
the  apostles  mean  the  exercise  of  that  spirit- 
ual faculty  within  them  that  lived  by  the  life 


THE   RELIGION   OF  JESUS  227 

of  Jesus.  They  were  not  believing  things  about 
him.  Day  by  day  they  were  drawing  vigor, 
vision,  and  virtue  from  him.  And  the  reason 
why  the  Gospels  are  so  invaluable  to  us,  and 
no  criticisms  can  ever  rob  them  of  their  value, 
lies  just  here  —  they  give  to  us,  in  its  simple 
beauty,  its  compelling  reasonableness,  and  its 
utter  comprehensiveness,  this  imperishable 
picture  of  the  Son  of  man. 

At  the  bidding  of  faith  man  stands  forth 
transfigured  and  transfiguring  in  his  power ; 
for  faith  is  a  vast  unused  capacity  inside  all 
men.  This  is  the  emphasis  Christ  lays  upon 
it :  "  All  things  are  possible  to  him  that  be- 
lieveth."  "  Look  not,"  he  says,  "  even  to  me 
for  immediate  deliverance,  call  not  on  some 
new  power,  seek  not  to  ally  yourself  with  some 
awe-inspiring  thing.  Can  you  believe?  Be- 
lieve with  only  a  little  belief,  come  with  me 
and  I  will  show  you.  All  things  are  possible 
to  him  that  belie veth." 

When  Jesus  stands  beside  us  and  calls  on 
us  to  believe,  we  sometimes  feel  that  we,  too, 
can  face  all  the  pathos  and  tragedy  of  life  as 


228  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

he  speaks.  Why,  then,  have  we  done  so  little 
with  this  divine  endowment?  What  are  we 
doing  with  it  ?  Casting  it  into  the  lumber- 
room  of  unused  things,  or  in  some  pitiful 
way  putting  it  into  evidence,  as  in  some 
homes  they  put  the  family  Bible  on  a  table 
by  itself,  where  you  could  write  with  your 
finger  on  the  dusty  cover.  This,  we  are  told, 
is  a  day  in  which  faith  is  waning,  and  yet 
we  believe  in  many  things,  believe  quite  as 
much  as  any  generation  before  believed,  and 
feverishly  follow  the  things  we  believe.  But 
the  faith  of  which  Christ  spoke,  misdirected 
and  misused,  shrinks  within  us.  Crowded 
out  by  mean  ambition,  debased,  it  loses  its 
hold.  Starved  and  untended,  it  seems  to  fail 
us  at  the  supreme  hour  of  need.  We  do  not 
take  time  to  believe  in  God.  Perhaps  we  know 
that  once  we  did  believe  in  him,  and  we  think 
that  our  belief  is  with  us  still ;  but  some  nights 
the  wind  begins  to  rise,  and  we  hear  the  voice 
of  the  coming  storm  and  our  unused  faith 
avails  us  little. 

Ah,  some  of  us  have  lived  in  havens  land- 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  229 

locked.  Safely  anchored  we  have  been  by  stem 
and  stern,  and  no  storm  test  of  life  has  been 
possible.  We  have  come  to  believe  that  our 
portion  in  existence  must  be  everlasting  seren- 
ity. But  no ;  we  too  must  front  the  stress  of 
wind  and  weather,  and  all  we  have  been  and 
done  must  be  tested  by  the  winds  that  blow, 
the  floods  that  flow,  and  the  rains  that  beat 
upon  the  houses  of  our  lives.  Friendships  only 
built  on  favors  accepted ;  deeds  that  look  won- 
derful outside,  but  are  hollow  within ;  popular 
descriptions  of  us,  with  which  men  flatter  us, 
or  tickle  our  vanity  while  we  know  them  to 
be  more  than  half  deceits  —  what  are  all  of 
these  worth  ?  They  are  only  wreckage  before 
the  first  rockings  of  that  storm.  Yet  God  for 
every  soul  of  man  hath  prepared  that  which, 
doth  he  but  use  it,  will  bear  him  to  haven  and 
safety. 

I  have  seen  an  old  boat  lie  on  the  shore. 
Well  built  it  had  been  and  well  shaped.  Its 
lines  are  fair  and  strong.  There  is  its  rudder; 
oars  and  sails  lie  wrapped  beneath  its  thwarts. 
Launch  into  the  wild  sea  and  trust  yourself 


230  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

to  it,  and  quickly  it  sinks  with  you  into  the 
salt  water.  Any  child  can  tell  you  why.  For 
years  it  has  lain  unused.  The  sans  have  smit- 
ten it  and  the  frosts  have  cracked  it.  Its  seams 
gape,  its  timbers  part.  It  is  fairly  shaped ;  it 
was  strongly  built.  It  could  once  carry  fifty. 
Now  it  is  only  a  coffin  for  one.  It  has  never 
been  put  to  sea.  It  is  no  more  help  than  a 
boat  painted  on  canvas.  In  the  hour  of  trial 
it  fails,  as  all  unused,  unexercised  things  must 
fail.  So  it  is  with  faith.  Carefully,  wisely, 
firmly  within  us,  the  quality  and  capacity  of 
faith  has  been  builded.  It  was  meant  to  bear 
us  through  all  storms  and  temptations  to  a 
fairer,  farther  shore ;  but  laid  away,  forgot- 
ten, unused,  it  moulders,  shrinks,  and  dries  up 
beyond  recovery. 

But  let  us  turn  and  look  more  deeply  into 
the  nature  of  faith,  see  how  it  comes  to  be, 
and  why  its  exercise  is  so  vital  to  us.  You 
judge  of  a  tree  by  its  fruits,  not  by  its  leaf  or 
even  by  its  flower.  You  judge  of  any  course 
of  events  by  its  results ;  a  theory,  too,  a  doc- 
trine, a  philosophy  —  nay  more,  any  govern- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  231 

ment  or  institution.  They  must  all  submit  to 
the  same  test.  By  that  they  stand  or  fall.  Not 
only  is  there  no  fairer  test,  but  there  is  no 
other  test.  This,  you  say,  is  sound  theory. 
Nay,  you  say  it  is  more  than  theory  —  it  is 
well-ascertained  fact ;  for  though  we  may  often 
deny  and  forget  it,  the  nature  of  things 
around  us  never  forgets  it. 

Nature  has  been  working  on  this  line  for 
ages  untold.  She  accepts  and  preserves  as 
her  instruments  only  things  that  successfully 
endure  this  final  test.  She  has  a  vast  work  to 
do,  carries  on  innumerable  manufactories  un- 
der inconceivably  numerous  conditions.  She 
tries  all  sorts  of  tools  in  her  vast  workshop, 
and  ever  and  always  casts  aside  all  tools  that 
break  or  fail.  In  the  process  she  piles  up 
heaps  of  failures,  but  the  things  she  finally 
arrives  at  — the  good  things,  the  useful  things, 
beautiful  and  fitted  things — these  all  have 
stood  the  test  successfully.  They  are  not  only 
good,  but  they  keep  on  improving.  In  this 
consists  their  vital  goodness.  They  are  all  the 
time  being  tested  by  competition. 


232  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

How  we  hated,  as  boys,  our  first  competi- 
tive examinations.  How  well  we  remember  the 
long  breath  we  drew  when  we  were  through 
the  last  of  them.  And  yet,  when  we  left  the 
examination  room,  as  we  thought  forever,  we 
were  only  entering  the  larger  examination  hall 
of  life.  When  we  left  the  competition  of  the 
book,  study,  and  paper,  we  were  entering  on 
a  fiercer  test  of  competition  still.  For  compe- 
tition rules  everywhere :  in  the  air  and  sky,  — 
yes,  far  aloft  in  the  ether,  —  in  the  dark  earth 
beneath  our  feet,  in  the  sunless  gulfs  of  the 
sea.  Every  blade  of  grass,  every  ear  of  corn 
holds  its  own  by  competition.  The  multitud- 
inous things  that  crawl,  that  live,  that  walk, 
that  swim,  that  fly  —  they  are  all  of  them, 
little  as  we  notice  it,  holding  their  own  pain- 
fully, in  circumstances  of  fierce  struggle.  And 
so  it  is  that  from  her  vast  competition  halls 
nature  brings  forth  not  only  the  good  but  the 
best.  Only  the  best  survive,  because  she  ad- 
mits no  favoritism  in  her  vast  household. 
Her  system  is  absolutely  fair.  She  scorns  all 
suggestions  of  "pull."  She  loves  the  strong, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  233 

the  fair,  the  good,  and  these  at  their  strongest, 
fairest,  and  best.  All  lesser  goods  and  fairs 
and  strongs  are  ever  making  way,  under  her 
order,  for  her  best,  her  fairest,  and  her 
strongest. 

When  we  denounce  competition  we  de- 
nounce a  divinely  ordained  process  for  weed- 
ing out  the  imperfect.  Nay,  further,  we  de- 
nounce the  only  conceivable  process  by  which 
sorrow,  pain,  imperfection,  and  at  last  death 
itself,  can  be  done  away.  Let  us  gird  up  the 
loins  of  our  minds,  face  facts,  and  cease  cry- 
ing for  the  moon.  By  competition  we  are  what 
we  are;  by  competition  our  children  shall  be, 
please  God,  better  than  we.  God's  great  com- 
petitive examination  board  is  ever  in  session, 
and  through  it  our  nation  has  been  lately 
passing,  as  you  well  know. 

The  point  I  want  to  make  is  this:  This 
faith  which  Jesus  demands  of  us  is  a  common 
possession.  It  is  a  religious  instinct  which  even 
a  child  possesses;  it  is  acquired  by  us  all  as 
all  other  valuable  qualities  are,  as  the  result 
of  a  system  of  competition.  The  knowledge 


234  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

of  these  later  times  has  bidden  us  hold  what 
is  old  with  new  reverence.  The  very  fact  that 
it  is  old  carries  to  the  thoughtful  mind  proof 
of  its  vitality.  Its  age  is  the  medal  on  its 
breast,  telling  of  the  many  victories  it  has 
won,  the  struggles  in  which  it  has  conquered 
things  of  lesser  good  than  itself.  So  we  value 
what  is  old,  and  we  call  it  beautiful,  for  we 
know  it  is  the  result  of  actual  worth,  that  no 
favoritism  of  nature  has  saved  it  for  us.  And 
this  truth  teaches  us  a  new  respect  for  the 
good  things  around  us  and  within  us.  They 
are  not  only  ancient ;  they  are  costly,  they  are 
approved,  they  have  won  their  right  to  use 
and  a  hearing.  And  the  greatest,  the  most 
lasting,  the  most  universal  of  these  is  faith. 

But  there  is  a  further  reason  for  valuing 
faith,  another  proof  of  its  importance.  It  is  not 
sufficient  in  God's  economy  that  things  should 
be  old ;  they  must  also  be  adaptable,  for  no 
quality  or  possession,  however  venerable,  that 
lacks  this  capacity  for  adaptation  can  live  on ; 
or,  to  go  back  to  what  I  have  said,  can  keep 
improving,  can  keep  on  holding  its  own  in 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  235 

the  competitive  examinations  of  God.  And 
therefore  the  proof  of  the  vitality  of  faith  is 
the  measure  and  magnitude  of  its  adapta- 
bility.  Adaptability,  in  this  sense,  comes  to 
be  a  greater  sign  of  vitality  than  age.  And 
this  adaptability  is  the  preeminent  quality  of 
faith.  When  man's  condition  was  low,  his  faith 
was  base-born.  It  clothed  itself  in  base  forms. 
When  his  moral  ideas  were  undeveloped  he 
clothed  his  ideas  of  God  with  his  own  imper- 
fections. When  he  was  cruel,  so  was  his  God ; 
lustful,  so  was  his  God;  jealous  and  full  of 
hatred  to  his  enemies,  his  God  was  a  God  of 
battles  and  a  jealous  God.  The  reason  thought- 
less people  to-day  find  fault  with  the  Bible  is 
because  the  presentations  of  God  which  its 
pages  bring  to  us  do  not  agree  with  our  pre- 
sent conceptions  of  God.  If  the  Bible  were 
not  full  of  misconceptions,  or  old  and  imper- 
fect conceptions,  it  could  not  in  any  sense  be 
the  Bible  at  all.  It  could  not  be  a  true  history 
of  man's  reaching  out  in  earlier  times  toward 
God.  In  centuries  much  later  than  those 
whose  record  we  have  in  the  Bible,  you  can 


236  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

note  the  same  process.  From  Pagan  to  Puri- 
tan you  follow  the  idea  of  God,  and  God  is 
chiefly  a  lawgiver,  his  chief  seat  the  judgment 
seat,  his  title  the  Lord  of  Hosts. 

But  our  faith  calls,  yearns  for  something 
higher,  for  a  God  higher  than  the  lawgiving 
God  and  the  ruling  God.  Yes,  for  One  whose 
infinite  tenderness  and  mercy  can,  as  the  old 
hymn  puts  it,  — 

Make  the  dying  bed 

Feel  soft  as  downy  pillows  are. 

So  in  the  Bible  and,  since  the  Bible  was 
written,  still  on  in  human  history,  faith  gath- 
ers up  all  the  broken  lights  that  have  come 
from  God,  all  the  thoughts  which  men  have 
in  their  best  hours  worthily  formed  of  him ; 
gathers  them  from  the  artist  yearning  for  his 
beauty ;  from  the  poet  divining  his  meaning ; 
from  the  philosopher  thirsting  for  his  truth ; 
yes,  from  misunderstood  heresiarch,  reformer, 
and  martyr.  From  all  religions  and  all  histo- 
ries, faith  gathers  them  up,  and  sees  in  the 
teachings  of  Jesus  the  explanation  and  vindi- 
cation of  them  all.  Old  and  new,  changing 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  237 

because  it  lives,  who  can  fix  for  it  a  birth- 
date  ?  Who  can  set  any  boundary  for  its  ad- 
vancing tide?  Man's  hunger  for  and -appre- 
ciation of  God,  —  so  the  Son  of  man  explains 
to  us  the  universal  instinct.  We  are  not  in- 
venting an  explanation  of  faith.  We  are  face 
to  face  with  its  actuality.  This  faith  of  ours 
is  as  much  an  evolution  as  our  eyes  are,  as 
our  hands  are  ;  and  to-day  with  us  it  is  not 
the  rudimentary  thing  it  once  was,  just  as  our 
eyes  are  not  the  rudimentary  things  they  were 
once,  or  our  hands  the  rudimentary  things  the 
monkeys  once  had.  Eyes  and  hands  and  faith 
have  all  been  developed  by  ages  of  painful 
use. 

But  I  hear  some  one  object,  and  the  ob- 
jection seems  at  first  both  reasonable  and 
weighty  :  What  proof  have  you  that  this  faith 
—  the  result  of  evolution,  possessing  wonder- 
ful powers  of  adaptation  —  has  not,  like  many 
other  old  things,  fulfilled  its  purpose,  become 
no  longer  useful?  Let  us  consider  this  a  mo- 
ment. There  are  things  within  us  that  are  old, 
and  have  no  doubt  in  the  past  been  adaptable, 


238  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

but,  so  far  as  we  can  see,  are  useful  no  longer. 
What  distinguishes  them  ?  They  are  like  links 
connecting  us  to  the  brutishness  of  the  past. 
They  are  marks  of  a  lower  order.  The  scien- 
tists call  them  vestigice,  for  they  are  carried 
around  by  the  living  body,  but  are  not  fulfill- 
ing a  living  function ;  are  not  vitally  import- 
ant to  any  part  of  our  lives.  The  proof  that 
we  can  do  without  them  is  that  we  do  not  use 
them  at  all,  or  use  them  less  and  less. 

Now  faith,  I  hold,  is  not  one  of  these.  What 
is  best  and  highest  and  most  seemly  in  our 
lives  is  ever  dependent  on  the  exercise  of  the 
religious  instinct.  It  would  not  be  hard  to 
prove  that  in  every  department  of  progress 
man  fortifies  and  inspires  himself  by  the  use 
of  this  part  of  himself  —  the  inspirational  im- 
pulse toward  the  best  of  which  he  is  cogniz- 
ant. Scientific  progress  and  scientific  men  are 
commonly  supposed  to  have  little  to  do  with 
faith  (a  supposition  which,  by  the  way,  I  think 
is  false),  but  to-day  faith  has  modified  the 
whole  aspect  of  science.  Contrast  the  greatest 
scientists  the  past  has  produced  with  the  pre- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  239 

sent  scientific  men.  Consider  the  wisdom  of 
Egypt  confronting  the  baffling  mysteries  of 
the  universe.  Hear  the  spirit  of  the  past  speak 
in  the  motto  of  the  Temple  of  Isis :  "  I  am 
whatever  hath  been,  is,  or  ever  will  be,  and 
my  veil  hath  no  man  yet  lifted."  Now  hear 
the  later  voice  :  "  Veil  after  veil  have  we  lifted, 
and  her  face  grows  more  beautiful,  august, 
and  wonderful,  with  every  barrier  withdrawn." 

But  let  us  contrast  religion  where  faith 
dwells  and  the  religion  where  mere  resignation 
takes  the  place  of  the  hope  and  inspiration 
that  rightly  belongs  to  faith.  For  let  us  not 
forget  this  :  Faith  is  never  mere  acceptance ; 
it  is  the  appreciation  of  God  that  yearns  and 
strives  and  grows  from  good  to  better  and 
from  pure  to  purer.  It  is  the  religious  instinct 
in  exercise. 

In  reading  an  interesting  book  lately,  the 
tale  of  a  strange  life  lived  in  the  Far  East, — 
Colonel  Gardiner's  "Memoirs," — I  came  on 
this  story.  Gardiner  was  staying  with  a  moun- 
tain chieftain  who  held  sway  over  a  lonely 
valley  on  the  borders  of  Thibet.  This  valley 


240  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

and  all  its  inhabitants  were  threatened  by  the 
ruthless  incursion  of  a  more  powerful  chief- 
tain, of  whom  all  the  people  lived  in  dread. 
Gardiner's  host  set  himself  to  procure  a  pre- 
sent which,  when  presented  to  the  tyrant, 
would  save  his  people  from  rapine.  An  old 
fakir  lived  in  a  cave  at  the  mouth  of  the  val- 
ley. For  years  the  old  man  had  lived  only  to 
pray  and  to  share  his  scanty  provision  with 
travellers  poorer  than  himself.  He  possessed, 
however,  an  extraordinary  ruby,  which  had 
come  to  him  by  direct  descent,  a  family  heir- 
loom from  the  time  of  the  great  Timour.  Gar- 
diner describes  their  visit  to  the  old  man. 
They  found  him  immersed  in  contemplation, 
and  the  chief  told  the  cause  of  their  visit,  the 
threatened  invasion,  the  certain  ruin  to  all  his 
people,  and  begged  that,  in  the  hope  of  pro- 
pitiating the  tyrant,  the  old  man  would  give 
to  him  his  one  treasure.  He  listened,  said 
Gardiner,  and  then  he  arose,  went  to  a  corner 
of  the  hut  and  unwound  the  jewel  (which,  by 
the  way,  was  as  safe  in  his  keeping  as  though 
it  had  been  in  the  Bank  of  England,  for  no 


THE   RELIGION  OF  JESUS ;  241 

one  in  that  country  would  touch  the  dwelling 
of  the  fakir),  unwound  the  jewel  from  a  bit 
of  rag,  and  put  it  in  his  visitor's  hands,  say- 
ing, "  I  hope  the  gift  may  have  the  result  you 
expect."  Large  money  was  offered,  but  this 
the  old  man  would  not  take.  "  But  you  may, 
if  you  will,"  he  said,  "  give  me  a  larger  allow- 
ance of  corn,  for  many  hungry  people  pass 
this  way."  Then  he  asked  to  be  left  alone,  and 
composed  himself  to  prayer  again.  Here  in 
this  lonely,  distant,  unknown  land,  where  no 
Anglo-Saxon  had  ever  come  before,  was  holi- 
ness of  a  pure  type,  unworldliness  complete 
in  its  renunciation,  charity  as  unselfish  as  that 
of  the  Son  of  man  himself.  Yet  numberless 
such  men  have  for  long  centuries  sat  in  their 
caves  or  huts,  looking  over  the  fair  plains  and 
valleys  of  those  cruel  lands.  Alas,  their  holi- 
ness has  not  availed  in  those  regions  to  ad- 
vance  by  an  inch,  so  far  as  we  can  see,  the 
cause  of  life,  humanity,  and  truth.  Lust  and 
cruelty  reign  supreme.  Regions  once  prosper- 
ous and  happy  are  desert  and  soaked  in  blood. 
Man  still  remains  as  he  has  been  for  centuries, 


242  THE   REASONABLENESS   OF 

a  ravening  wild  beast.  And  why?  Because 
the  progressive  power  of  religion  lives  in  faith 
alone,  and  not  in  mere  unworldliness.  No  re- 
nunciation, no  unselfish  charity,  no  piety, 
nor  all  these  combined,  however  splendid  they 
are,  can,  when  faith  has  fled  from  them,  per- 
manently uplift  mankind. 

There  is  no  such  thing  as  heredity  in  good- 
ness. Men  are  like  tops  often.  The  top  spins 
a  long  time  after  the  string  that  spun  it  is 
withdrawn,  but  in  time  it  totters  to  a  fall.  So 
hereditary  goodness  stored  up  will  uphold  in- 
dividuals, will  for  a  time  even  sustain  society ; 
but  take  faith  away,  and  though  courage  still 
upholds  the  brave,  and  fortitude  still  supports 
the  strong  of  heart,  the  skies  have  become  gray 
over  the  pilgrim  masses  of  men,  their  march- 
ing lines  have  become  broken,  and  no  sweet 
singing  cheers  the  march,  no  heavenly  allies 
help  them  on  their  way.  Such  pilgrims  will 
not  keep  on  marching  forever,  such  soldiers 
will  soon  cease  to  fight ;  for  even  Mr.  Great- 
heart  is  himself  a  pilgrim,  without  hope  of  a 
celestial  city ;  and  Galahad  a  knight-errant, 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  243 

who  dares  no  longer  hope  for  a  glimpse  of  the 
white  light  of  the  Holy  Grail. 

But  let  us  see  how  the  Church  has  dealt 
with  faith.  First,  let  us  remember  it  is  not  the 
policy  of  the  Lord  himself  to  destroy  old  con- 
ceptions that  are  part  of  man's  growing.  He  re- 
places them  slowly  with  better  ones.  And  so  his 
new  gospel,  as  it  clashed  with  time-honored  be- 
liefs, must  merge  and  mingle  with  them.  Man- 
kind's whole  previous  conception  of  God  was 
as  unlike  Jesus  Christ  as  it  well  could  be. 
When  the  bodily  vision  of  him  passed,  the 
great  doctors  and  saints  of  the  time  soon  be- 
gan to  create  from  his  teachings,  as  they  un- 
derstood them,  systems  of  religion  crude  in 
form  and  profession,  differing  radically  from 
Christ's  gospel.  It  could  not  be  otherwise. 
Man's  dominating  idea  of  God  has  been  the 
God  of  force.  Sheer  almightiness  was  exalted, 
—  man  bidden  to  bow,  —  but  sheer  almighti- 
ness has  no  sweet  reasonableness.  It  may  com- 
mand and  threaten,  but  it  ever  remains  a  sort 
of  militant  rule  of  life,  a  martial  law  for  con- 
science; the  rigorous  control  during  a  crisis, 


244  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

not  the  normal  condition  of  a  peaceful  and  pro- 
gressive life.  But  since  the  mere  almighty  idea 
of  God  of  necessity  died  slowly,  ere  it  passed 
there  grew  from  it  a  whole  series  of  concep- 
tions of  a  punishing  and  damning  God.  Men 
bowed  to  religious  laws  as  they  bowed  to  na- 
tional laws.  The  world  owed  much  to  the  iron 
law  of  rule,  and  in  the  Church,  in  lesser  scale, 
came  naturally  to  be  reproduced  a  similar  con- 
dition. It  seemed  reasonable  for  men  to  de- 
mand, in  the  name  of  God,  obedience,  accept- 
ance of  certain  definite  things.  They  made 
pictures  of  Jesus  that  we,re  often  veriest  cari- 
catures. They  baked  their  truths  into  hard-and- 
fast  shape.  Things  that  appeared  to  be  true 
about  Jesus,  men  were  told  they  must  believe ; 
and  faith  came  to  be  a  demand,  enforced  by 
threat,  and  not  the  exercise  of  an  instinct. 

The  movement  was  inevitable.  I  have  re- 
ferred to  it  before.  It  was  the  highest  sort  of 
religious  movement  that  the  time  was  capable 
of,  but  none  the  less  it  replaced  Christ's  idea 
of  faith  with  a  lesser  idea.  It  practically  said 
that  faith  was  not  merely  the  exercise  of  the 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  245 

religious  instinct  addressed  to  its  Lord,  but 
the  enforced  belief  in  a  complex  system  of 
things.  I  have  dwelt  on  this  devolution  of 
Christianity  just  to  show  that  it  was  a  growth, 
in  the  opposite  direction  to  Christ's  teaching. 
As  I  have  said,  it  had  to  be.  The  world  of 
that  day  was  not  capable  of  evolving  or 
accepting  anything  higher.  But  the  truth  put 
in  hard-and-fast  shape,  or  in  a  word,  dogmas, 
cannot  produce  the  highest  form  of  Christ's 
likeness.  Dogmas  are  poor  food  for  the  soul. 
The  Great  Physician  knew  best,  and  seeing 
far  into  the  future  as  he  did,  and  knowing 
what  must  be  the  deepest  needs  of  the  present, 
as  well  as  of  future  times,  he  never  once  made 
a  demand  on  any  soul  for  this  lower  sort  of 
faith.  Well  he  knew  that  belief  in  the  mere 
almightiness  of  God  only  tends  to  make  strong 
natures  diabolic;  that  repression  incites  rebel- 
lion. And  so,  in  not  one  single  authentic  in- 
cident did  he  so  represent  his  Father  or  make 
claim  for  himself.  Recall  one  instant,  if  you 
can,  where  faith,  as  Jesus  demanded  it,  meant 
believing  in  things.  Always  and  ever,  rather, 


246  THE  REASONABLENESS   OF 

did  faith  with  hini  mean  belief  in  the  sort  of 
God  that  "  I  reveal  to  you  "  ;  "  he  that  hath 
seen  me  hath  seen  the  Father." 

So  much  for  Christ's  demand.  How  about 
the  apostles'  demand  for  faith.  What  did  they 
mean,  for  example,  by  faith  as  a  prerequisite 
to  baptism  ?  What  was  baptism?  Was  it  more 
than  a  common  rite  to  which  was  given  a  new 
significance,  an  open  confession  in  the  sight 
of  men  of  obedience  to  Jesus,  a  declaration 
that  he  was  the  Son  of  God ;  that  his  cause 
was  the  one  to  fight  for ;  his  society  the  divine 
and  final  society?  Those  who  would  be  his  fol- 
lowers must  be  baptized.  What  was  the  form 
of  baptism  ?  We  know  that  baptism  at  first 
was  not  administered  in  any  other  form  but 
the  name  of  Jesus.  The  very  early  Christ- 
ians were  not  even  baptized  in  the  name  of 
the  Trinity.  This  was  a  later  form.  Belief  in 
Jesus  was  the  one  thing  demanded,  and  that 
without  any  disquisition  on  the  nature  of  God 
at  all. 

There  is  not  one  single  line  in  all  St.  Paul's 
thirteen  letters  to  lead  us  to  suppose  that  he 


THE   RELIGION  OF  JESUS  247 

laid  any  stress,  with  the  multitude  of  his  eon- 
verts,  on  mysterious  questions  of  religious 
truth  ;  whether,  for  instance,  Jesus  was  the  son 
of  Mary  alone,  or  the  son  of  Mary  and  Joseph. 
The  subject  does  not  come  up  with  St.  Paul. 
Nor  is  there  one  line  to  lead  us  to  suppose  he 
formulated  for  his  converts  any  doctrine  of 
the  Trinity.  Rather,  Paul  said,  as  his  Master 
had  said  before  him,  "  Jesus  stands  before  you 
—  do  you  admire  him,  can  you  love  him,  can 
you  find  it  in  your  hearts  to  obey  him?  I 
speak  to  you  as  the  apostle,  the  messenger  to 
a  despairing  world  of  the  visible  God  in  hu- 
manity. Here  at  last  is  rest,  pardon,  and  hope 
for  men." 

But  this  is  not  what  men  are  asked  to  do 
to-day.  They  are  confronted  with,  or  think 
they  are  confronted  with,  certain  churchly  de- 
mands. They  must  stand  up  to  say  a  creed, 
and  they  are  told  that  that  creed  is  not  sim- 
ply a  symbol  of  their  faith,  but  an  accurate 
definition  of  things  which  they  believe  to  be 
utterly  beyond  human  defining.  Or,  second, 
they  must  submit  to  the  rite  of  baptism.  But 


248  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

baptism  does  not  seem  to  them  to  be  quite  what 
the  old  rite  was.  Once  it  meant  danger  braved, 
and  now,  too  often,  they  see  it  degraded  till 
it  is  merely  a  fashionable  function.  And  the 
third  demand  is  that  they  should  kneel  at  the 
communion  table,  where  again  u  believing 
things  "  confronts  them.  They  have  some  dim 
idea  of  what  it  meant  to  kneel  with  the  Lord 
of  long  ago,  when  the  multitude  clamored  for 
him  and  were  plotting  his  death ;  to  kneel 
around  the  altars  of  the  early  Church  when 
heathen  Rome  thundered  and  the  Arena 
reeked  of  blood.  But  what  does  this  mean  to- 
day ?  They  are  told  it  expresses  a  sorrow  for 
sin  which  they  cannot  always  honestly  call 
forth. 

I  might  go  further,  but  time  forbids  me. 
Here  these  three  simple  acts,  these  demands 
of  the  Church,  are  each  and  all  of  them  made 
to  rest  on  a  false  idea  of  faith.  They  are  not 
made  the  expression  of  personal  obedience  and 
reverence  for  Jesus.  They  have  been  perverted 
from  that.  And  can  we  not  see  that  the  nat- 
ural man,  the  inferior  man,  often  likes  this 


THE   RELIGION  OF  JESUS  249 

system  of  perversion,  that  he  will  readily  com- 
ply with  these  things?  Cannot  any  one  see 
that  he  does  this  because  he  is  a  lesser  man  ? 
The  more  scrupulous  men,  however,  —  the 
men  built  to  a  higher  order,  whose  religion 
does  not  mean  a  bargaining  with  God,  but  an 
effort  to  follow  God  in  honesty  of  soul,  — 
these  greater,  larger  men  cannot  accept  such 
conditions,  but  ever  draw  back  from  them. 
They  do  so,  not  captiously,  but  in  order  that 
they  may  safeguard  the  very  eye  of  the  soul, 
the  religious  instinct  itself.  A  faith  in  things 
suits  the  natural  man,  alas,  too  well.  He  is 
ever  its  defender.  But  it  leaves  uncomforted 
and  unblest  men  of  larger  mould. 

So,  based  on  this  misapprehension  of  the 
meaning  of  faith,  there  has  grown  up  a  false 
idea  of  the  Church.  From  the  Church  men 
turn  away,  for  she  seems  to  come  to  them  with 
intolerable  demands.  She  makes  them  sus- 
pect God,  not  love  him.  She  seems  an  exact- 
ing Church,  not  a  giving  and  freeing  Church, 
as  of  old  she  came  in  beauty  and  might  to 
men.  The  best  and  most  scrupulous  men  hold 


250  THE   REASONABLENESS  OF 

back  from  her  too  often,  doubtful  of  that  to 
which  they  are  asked  to  commit  themselves. 
Could  they  but  realize  that  religious  faith  is 
only  a  striving  after  obedience  to  Jesus,  the 
simple,  great  Jesus  Christ  of  the  Gospels ;  seek- 
ing to  do  what  he  would  have  us  do  to  make 
earth  more  fit  for  his  divine  rule,  slowly  to 
lift  life's  laws  into  harmony  with  love's  law! 
Let  the  Church  demand  these  things  of  men, 
and  again  will  men  listen  to  her,  and  again 
will  she  lead  them  on  in  the  path  of  a  high 
resolve.  And  though  they  stagger,  painfully 
at  times,  yet  will  they  follow  her,  for  follow- 
ing her  will  then  be  following  the  Son  of 
man. 

Faith,  then,  as  Jesus  and  also  his  apostles 
demanded  its  exercise,  was  not  believing  things 
that  were  hard  to  believe.  It  was  using  a  di- 
vinely implanted  instinct,  a  power  and  a  fac- 
ulty within  us  that  answers  to  the  presentation 
of  the  living,  loving  God  made  visible  in  Jesus 
Christ.  When  this  faith  has  failed  to  fasten  its 
grasp  on  him,  again  and  again  it  has  created 
for  itself  distorted  images,  again  and  again  it 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  251 

has  found  itself  disastrously  following  wan- 
dering fires ;  but  still  it  ever  contains  within 
itself  power  to  turn  to  the  true  vision  and 
bow  before  the  supreme  beauty,  perceiving 
the  beautiful  to  be  beautiful  and  the  good  to 
be  good,  and,  therefore,  sent  from  God.  From 
this  the  Christian  Church  started,  and  to  this 
the  Christian  Church  must  return.  This  is  the 
real  Church.  This  is  the  real  Christianity. 
This  is  the  Christianity  that  shook  the  old 
world  and  lifted  it  out  of  its  despair.  This  is 
the  Christianity  that  can  breathe  peace  into 
the  deep  unrestfulness  of  our  times.  It  shows 
no  defect  of  nature  to  refuse  to  believe  in  old 
things  just  because  they  are  old.  Tradition, 
however  venerable  and  weighty,  may  be  rooted 
in  utter  error.  It  has  often  been  proved  to  be 
so  rooted.  To  find  one's  self,  therefore,  in- 
capable of  accepting  truths  accredited  by  most 
venerable  tradition  shows  no  defect  of  nature. 
I  repeat ;  to  refuse  to  believe  things  is  no  sin  ; 
but  to  refuse  Jesus  the  faith  he  demands  — 
ah,  what  shall  wre  say  of  that  ? 

We  are  told  men  take  a  mass  of  precious 


252  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

stuff,  and,  subjecting  it  to  intolerable  heat, 
expect  at  last  to  see  glowing  in  its  centre  one 
tiny,  blood-red  drop  —  the  ruby.  So  in  Jesus 
there  is  for  man  the  declaration  of  his  own 
preciousness.  The  ages  of  human  struggle  have 
not  been  in  vain.  The  chaos  that  often  seemed 
to  engulf  man's  life  was  only  the  prelude  to 
God's  cosmos.  All  the  pains  and  all  the  strug- 
gles and  all  the  hopes  of  the  mothers  and 
fathers  of  the  world  were  justified  when  at 
last,  as  the  result  of  all  the  intolerable  heat 
and  pain  of  living,  there  came  forth  One  ut- 
terly beautiful,  completely  good,  and  men 
bowed  before  him  and  cried,  "  Behold  the  Son 
of  God." 

More  than  once  before  on  earth  had  burst 
forth  that  ecstatic  cry.  But  when  at  last  his 
own  lips  speak,  we  hear  him  say,  "  The  Son 
of  man"  To  fail  to  see  in  him  a  present  beauty, 
a  visible  loveliness ;  to  fail  to  hear  and  own 
the  sway  and  inspiration  of  his  heavenly  music 
—  this,  indeed,  is  to  argue  defect  and  limita- 
tion; for  such  failure  means,  in  part  at  least, 
a  moral  death. 


THE  RELIGION   OF  JESUS  253 

Press  faith  on  men,  emphasize  it  as  believ- 
ing things,  and  you  have  but  erected  thorny 
hedges  around  the  cross  of  the  Christ  through 
which  men  must  peep,  over  which,  wounded, 
they  must  strain,  and  after  all  only  see  partial 
views  and  catch  distorted  outlines  of  him  whom 
you  would  place  within.  This  has  been  done 
again  and  again ;  done  with  the  best  intention, 
done  by  those  possessed  of  a  passionate  love 
for  him  whom  they  would  protect.  But  the 
human  hedges,  whether  erected  by  friends  or 
foes,  with  spiny  barrier  forbid  the  child-faith 
he  so  loved  to  come  near  him. 

I  would  not  be  misunderstood.  Creeds  are 
necessary,  dogmas  in  their  place  essential.  I 
have  said  nothing  to  decry  them.  Many  dog- 
mas and  doctrines  have  been  slowly  evolved, 
and  are  the  result  of  much  pain,  of  long  and 
reverent  study,  and  show  a  profound  insight 
into  human  needs  and  divine  revelation.  Thus 
thoughtfully,  reverently,  let  us  receive  these 
partial  statements  of  eternal  truth,  till  the 
Master  open  our  minds  for  better  and  higher 
things  still.  Thoughtful  men  will  readily  admit 


254  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

that  we  must  have  creed  in  every  active  rela- 
tion of  life.  The  merchant  has  a  creed  in  his 
office ;  the  scientist  one  in  his  laboratory ;  the 
bricklayer  and  builder  one  at  his  fingers'  ends; 
and  the  soldier  who  charges  and  dies  does  so 
because  he  accepts  and  obeys  the  soldier's 
creed.  The  creed  is  a  certain  accepted  thing 
on  which  I,  as  a  man,  base  my  action.  The 
creed  is  a  working  necessity  at  all  times.  In 
every  department  of  life,  as  much  as  in  the 
religious  department,  " no  creed"  means  pa- 
ralysis. 

And  still  further,  I  must  hold  my  creed  with 
other  men,  and  make  it  a  basis  of  working 
with  other  men.  The  individualist  simply  ar- 
gues himself  a  fool  when  he  says:  "I  must 
unite  with  other  men  to  make  money,  unite  to 
get  learning,  unite  to  produce  any  valuable 
earthly  work,  or  unite  to  defend  anything  that 
is  worth  defending.  But  when  it  comes  to  a 
question  of  doing  good  and  developing  my 
own  character,  let  me  alone.  Here  I  will  be  my 
own  guide.  Here  no  man  shall  dictate  to  me, 
aid  me,  or  judge  me."  He  may  be  perfectly 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  255 

intelligent,  may  have  thought  intelligently 
along  other  lines,  but  along  the  spiritual  line 
he  is  not  a  thinker :  he  is  talking  foolishly. 

But  what  to-day  is  most  important  to  em- 
phasize surely  is  this  :  all  these  doctrines,  dog- 
mas, and  creeds,  however  necessary  they  may 
be,  are  but  crutches  and  walking-sticks,  not 
hands  and  feet.  They  are  but  a  temporary  ex- 
pression of  the  eternal  verity,  and  as  they 
change  and  pass,  by  their  very  change  are  evi- 
dencing the  might  of  the  living  truth  which, 
because  it  is  the  everlasting  seed,  can  ever, 
must  ever,  reclothe  itself  in  a  series  of  new 
and  beautiful  bodies,  thus  protecting  its  life. 

Shortly  before  he  died  Tennyson  said,  "  My 
most  passionate  desire  is  to  obtain  a  clearer 
and  fuller  view  of  God."  So  spoke  and  still 
speak  the  great  of  the  earth.  For  man  cannot 
live  by  bread  alone.  And  if  we  have  learned 
in  our  heart  of  hearts  to  want  Jesus,  nay,  if 
we  have  never  heard  his  name  and  yet  have 
sought  the  things  he  strove  for,  then  some 
glorious  day  he  will  surely  open  our  eyes  to 
see  the  things  we  cannot  see  now.  The  way 


256  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

shall  be  open  for  us,  and  the  lame  man  shall 
leap  as  the  hart,  and  the  tongue  of  the  dumb 
shall  sing.  The  little  lame  boy  needs  his  crutch 
as  he  limps  beside  his  father ;  but  when  they 
both  of  them  come  to  the  stream-side,  his  father 
takes  him  in  his  arms  and  he  needs  his  crutches 
no  more. 

Let  me  beg,  then,  your  careful  considera- 
tion for  the  meaning  of  faith.  I  insist  on  it  as 
of  vital  importance  to-day.  Oh,  let  us  search 
our  hearts  so  that  we  may  keep  alive  and  in 
health  this  divinely  appreciative  part  of  us. 
Are  we  making  provision  for  this  part  of  our 
life  itself?  It  is  ever  the  eye  of  the  soul;  and 
all  the  spicery  of  all  the  Indies,  all  the  glut  of 
all  the  seas  cannot  take  its  place,  cannot  satisfy 
the  soul  from  which  faith  is  departing. 

Be  you  inside  the  Church  or  outside  the 
Church,  I  charge  you,  then,  make  provision 
for  this  faith  that  is  in  you,  this  religious  fac- 
ulty God  has  given  you,  which  you  hold  by 
virtue  of  the  painful  struggles  of  the  past,  and 
for  the  handing  down  of  which  to  your  child- 
ren you  will    be  held   accountable   by  God. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  257 

Keep  the  religions  instinct  alight.  Keep  single 
this  divine  part.  For  in  each  soul  of  man  it  is 
the  little  window  opening  to  the  Everlasting 
Day.  It  is  because  this  wonderful  religious  in- 
stinct and  aspiration  within  us  links  us  to 
God  that  faith,  and  faith  only,  can  transform. 
By  faith's  use  it  is  absolutely  true  that  we  are 
transformed  men.  Faith  softens  us,  widens  us, 
deepens  our  sympathy.  It  breathes  a  peace 
over  all  life.  Why,  take  it  in  the  lower  sphere. 
You  trust  a  friend  of  great  resources  —  you 
who  are  poor  and  friendless  and  burdened 
with  a  load  you  cannot  carry.  You  go  to  your 
friend,  you  lay  your  case  before  him.  He 
meets  you  with  kindly  hand  and  eye,  and  be- 
fore you  know  it  your  burden  is  rolling  from 
your  shoulders,  and  you  go  away  from  his 
house  or  his  office  with  lighter  tread  and  hope 
reborn.  Or  you  trust  in  some  one  you  love  — 
your  friend,  your  child  —  and  in  the  strength 
of  that  trust,  no  matter  how  fierce  the  sun  or 
how  cruel  the  cold  and  frost,  you  find  warmth 
and  shelter.  What  accomplishes  the  wonder? 
It  is  just  faith;  faith  in  what  is  highest  and 


258  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

best  in  those  you  know  down  here.  And  so 
you  go  forth  to  life's  inevitable  struggles  with 
a  gentler  heart.  Faith  justifies  all  it  does  and 
sees  here  by  what  it  believes  in  beyond.  Faith 
is  intuition  triumphing  over  appearances, "  the 
substance  of  things  hoped  for,  the  evidence  of 
things  not  seen."  Put  trust  in  God,  the  Good 
over  all,  the  Worker  in  all,  the  Power  behind 
all,  and  at  last  the  Judge  of  all —  not  the  out- 
side and  distant  God,  but  the  immanent  and 
inside  God,  moving  through  all  men.  When 
we  reach  this  point,  my  friends,  we  hear  an 
echo  of  divine  harmony,  and  we  know  the  be- 
ginnings of  a  holy  peace. 

We  know  in  part  —  how,  then,  can  we 
Make  plain  each  heavenly  mystery? 
Yet  still  the  Almighty  understands 
Our  human  hearts,  our  human  hands, 
And,  overarching  all  our  creeds, 
Gives  his  wide  presence  to  our  needs. 

And  now  I  turn  specially  to  you  young  men 
and  women  who  to-day  go  forth  from  this 
great  university  into  the  larger  life  beyond. 
Oh,  still  it  is  true,  true  to-day  as  it  was  eigh- 
teen hundred  years  ago  —  u  all  things  are  pos- 


THE   RELIGION   OF  JESUS  259 

sible  to  him  that  believeth."  Believe  in  your 
friends,  believe  in  your  country,  in  your  in- 
stitutions, in  yourself,  in  your  God.  Believe 
in  your  dreams,  your  best  and  highest  and 
holiest  dreams.  Many  things  you  may  have  to 
give  up,  but  never  surrender  these.  Use  the 
belief  you  have,  and  it  will  surely  grow  to 
more. 

Especially,  and  above  all,  fix  and  concen- 
trate your  belief  on  Jesus,  on  the  value  of  the 
things  he  declared  valuable ;  on  the  sort  of 
God  he  believed  in,  a  God  like  himself.  You 
are  ever  choosing  things  to  believe  in.  You 
can  and  do  "  will  to  believe."  Will  to  believe 
in  him,  and  in  his  Father  God.  His  person  and 
his  message  have  been  presented  to  humanity 
as  a  supernatural  revelation  that  demands  man's 
reverend  obedience  because  of  this  very  su- 
pernaturalness.  I  have  tried  to  commend  his 
gospel  to  you  on  far  other  grounds. 

Neither  in  the  personality  of  Jesus  nor  yet 
in  his  teachings  is  there  any  break  in  the  order 
of  the  world,  which  he  declared  to  be  a  divine 
order.    He  was  a  Jew ;  he  inherited  Jewish 


260  THE  REASONABLENESS  OF 

teaching  and  tradition,  a  teaching  and  tradi- 
tion that  gave  to  our  sorrowing  world  the  only 
God  it  can  ever  worship,  a  God  who  cares. 

We  can  all  love  the  beautiful,  we  can  all 
praise  the  strong,  but  in  humanity  there  is 
much  that  is  sordid  and  mean  and  small  and 
of  little  account,  and  a  real  God  must  be  the 
God  over  all,  loving  all,  caring  for  all,  responsi- 
ble for  all.  Humanity,  in  the  mass,  can  never 
and  never  will  worship  any  God  whose  tender 
mercies  are  not  over  all  his  works. 

Such  a  God  Jesus  brought  to  men.  Art 
never  dreamed  of  such  a  God  till  after  Jesus 
died.  Science  knows  him  not  to-day.  Science 
has  never  found  him.  Some  day  it  may  find 
him,  but  not  now.  But  the  hungry  heart  of 
man  is  a  wonderful  thing.  It  dreams  great 
dreams,  ever  and  anon  it  sees  high  visions. 

Jesus  will  yet  rule  the  world  because  he  em- 
bodies the  beliefs  and  hopes  of  the  world.  He 
is  the  product  of  our  order.  Ills  doctrines  are 
bid  the  setting  forth  of  the  long-cherished  in- 
stincts of  men.  He  is  our  King  because  he  is 
one  of  ourselves;  no  miraculous  visitor  from 


THE  RELIGION  OF  JESUS  261 

another  world,  but  a  man,  bone  of  our  bone, 
flesh  of  our  flesh.  In  him  the  hopes  and 
prayers  and  beliefs  of  the  dumb  millions  at 
last  take  voice. 

We  Christians  believe,  since  the  Incarnation 
of  Jesus,  since  to  us  was  born  a  man  full  of 
the  Holy  Ghost,  a  brighter  light,  a  clearer  vi- 
sion of  God  has  been  given  men.  Those  who 
try  to  follow  him,  who  take  him  as  a  master, 
and  seek  to  do  the  deeds  he  would  have  them 
do,  have  light  given  them  to  live  and  hope  and 
work  by.  They  need  no  oracular  authority. 
He  appointed  none.  At  the  same  time  they 
refuse  to  cut  themselves  off  from  the  reli- 
gious world  of  the  past.  He  did  so  refuse. 
He  knew  he  was  what  he  was  because  of  it; 
slowly  we  are  realizing  this  too.  In  the  heart 
of  man,  long  before  Jesus'  day,  was  born  the 
beginning  of  the  great  gospel,  God's  nature 
present  in  human  life.  This  is  the  supreme 
miracle,  if  you  will.  Man's  life  ever  moving 
upward  to  greater,  higher  ends,  by  process  of 
natural  law,  by  exercise*  of  instinctive  vision, 
or,   to  use  old  words,  by  inspiration  of  the 


262    THE  REASONABLENESS  OF  RELIGION 

Holy  Ghost.  This  is  the  gospel  of  good  news 
to  men,  gloriously  reasonable,  yet  surpassing 
all  reason.  And  he  who  brought  it  long  ago, 
still  in  beauty  and  holiness  and  power  to  help, 
stands  alone.  He  transcends  all  teachers.  He 
still  inspires  and  sustains  the  hopes  of  men. 


THE  END 


(8TI)e  ililierjiDc  |Dre^ 

CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U    .    S    .    A 


P||iffillfl  ■Sffi&feti  ..Seminary  Libra 


1    1012  01252  5400 


DATE  DUE 

__ _,„ 

„, 

GAYLORD 

PRINTED  IN  U.S.A. 

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